Open source version of active directory?

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On 04/20/2010 04:26 AM, James Bensley wrote:
> AD is Microsoft's directory system which started as LDAP and has
> been heavily extended so a starting place might be OpenLDAP?

Active Directory is more than LDAP. It's also Kerberos. LDAP determines 
what you are authorized to do once your credentials have been 
established by Kerberos. Samba 4 is supposed to be a drop-in replacement 
for Active Directory. That only matters if you need to establish a trust 
relationship with a Windows server. If you don't have to, you can use 
any LDAP server and Kerberos.

Joe Kaplan's message here: 
<http://forums.techarena.in/active-directory/1170562.htm> is useful.

Red Hat has a project called FreeIPA <http://freeipa.org> which combines 
MIT Kerberos and the former Netscape Directory Server, now called the 
389 Server (after the port that it listens on) to provide identity (I), 
policy (P), and auditing (A). The auditing part has been deferred but 
the other two parts work.

Ebox <http://www.ebox-platform.com/> is based on Ubuntu. Its creators 
claim that it can be a Windows domain controller by virtue of using 
OpenLDAP and Samba. Note that this is NT-style authentication, which is 
not the same as Active Directory. I tried it about a year ago and found 
it incomplete and buggy. The web site is fancier now so perhaps it's not 
so any longer.

An alternative to eBox is ClearOS 
<http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html>, which is based 
on Red Hat. I have used its predecessor, ClarkConnect, and it worked 
quite well.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
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