equivalent of windows server roles for unix

wolfric

Don't get me wrong i understand that unix like systems usually run under different conditions but does anyone know of any such system that has the features you'd find in a business environment. (ie not home use)

This includes things like group policy and logging into a domain and roaming profile etc.

rfrederick

I guess the first question is what are you wanting to accomplish? Is it the ability to manage Linux-based client machines? A central logon service for Linux client machines? Something else?

Mathiasb

rfrederick wrote: »

I guess the first question is what are you wanting to accomplish? Is it the ability to manage Linux-based client machines? A central logon service for Linux client machines? Something else?

This. What do you want? "Roaming profile" can be accomplished through different means (mounting the home dir on a server is one). Domain joining also works, with user integration, etc. You can do this in any Linux distribution, really.

amcc

There are a number of ways that Unix or Linux can be configured to have centralized password management, roaming profiles etc. It depends on what you are trying to do.
You can get a Linux client PC to authenticate against a Windows Active Directory domain , you can also get a Linux Samba file server to join an AD domain .

ressem

Implementing a group policy equivalent isn't something I've seen done well using zero cost software.
Tends to involve creating symlinks to files in some location synced using scp or dropbox equivalents.
Trying to customise profile files for thunderbird/ firefox / openoffice/gconf is certainly trickier than the group policy ADMs for IE/Office/registry with per user/group and per machine options.
And creating your own group policy management file is usually as easy as scripting an equivalent in linux.

Though if OSI says I should trust him, I'm sure that he's got a suggestion.

dubhthach

wolfric wrote: »

This includes things like group policy and logging into a domain and roaming profile etc.

Unix has been doing SSO (single signon) in one form or another since the 1980's. Sun wrote and released NIS/NIS+ back then. Now adays people tend to use some form of LDAP. There are both commericial and free LDAP implementations that will basically give you the same functionality as AD (which is an LDAP implementation itself)

One good way to manage system configuration across a huge number of machines is with cfengine. You can thus maintain different subsets of machines with different security/software setups. You only have to change the configuration in one place and it gets pushed out to all the hosts.

Regarding maintaining consistent user profiles across multiple machines for stuff like firefox etc. Well if you made sure that the user's home directory was nfs mount point. Ergo the same configuration files etc will be used for firefox etc on every machine they login into.

There is also a fair bit of commerical software out there for integrating Unix systems into AD/Group policy setup. Here's an example I found by a quick google.
http://www.likewise.com/products/likewise_enterprise/index.php