[ubuntu-uk] Public library OS choice

[Avi Greenbury]

Paul Sutton wrote:
> On 12/06/13 12:43, Avi Greenbury wrote:
> > Muñiz Piniella, Andrés wrote:
> >> Appart from canonical who could provide the service? And why is windows service
> >> cheaper than gnu/linux distros? I thought the reasoning was that one gnu/linux
> >> admin was more expensive than a windows admin but a gnu/linux admin could
> >> manage over more units, so turned out cheaper.
> > Windows desktops are easier (and faster) to manage in number than
> > Linux because Windows has AD and Linux doesn't. On the *server* that
> > thing about volume-per-person is truer. It's been a few years since I
> > last looked at this in any great depth, but not enough that anything
> > developed in the meantime is likely to be mature enough to really
> > rival AD.
> 
> 
> Isn't LDAP the equivalent of AD on windows.  ?
> 
> paul

Not really. The big bit of AD is the centralised authentication and
authorisation which is essentially Kerberos and LDAP respectively
which you can do for free under Linux (and people do this to get AD
auth working under Linux) but there's no real Linux replacement for
the mechanisms for pushing out policies to clients (to enforce
application installations or user restrictions), or for integration of
privileges into fileshares and mailservers.

-- 
Avi