this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
1201 points (95.5% liked)
linuxmemes
21625 readers
70 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Microsoft’s biggest strength is the Active Directory. Linux user and computer management is a huge PITA.
For Linux user management you can just use an LDAP solution like FreeIPA. You can even tailor sudoer rules based on security groups, so like you can allow someone to reboot the server but not actually make configuration changes to system config files and what-not. It'll also handle CA and PKI with smart card support and of course DNS. It has a web interface as well.
I’ve done workstation maintenance in a previous job. Every part of the Linux centralized management was worse than Windows. We did it to support our coworker’s wishes, but SSSD constantly shits the bed, and having to code (config management) to write some pretty simple rules like default printers is super annoying compared to the Active Directory built ins.
I don't know, I like using Fleet Commander with FreeIPA (where it stores the profile). You just spin up the template VM for whatever like-clients on the network you want to make default profiles for and make the changes, shut it down, checkbox the changes (the configurations and stuff) that you approve and let it apply the profiles across the network. Easier than depending on Puppet or Ansible playbooks IMO.
I have had issues with SSSD as well though and it had to do with Kerberos tickets but I can't remember what I did to fix it. We'd have to manually use kinit on each machine when it'd basically fall off the realm. I want to say it was a DNS issue but it was so long ago, I just don't remember.
We used to use Centrify for Linux and Solaris and it was easy using Access Manager to basically handle AD users and computers with Active Directory and had some GPO support (you could push config writes with GPOs for example and organize it all via OUs for example) but it would get a little wonky between trusts in the forest sometimes (in regards to zone management in Centrify) and they kept getting more expensive. Maybe they've fixed that stuff now but it was really simple to use and you could basically manage a lot through the AD and create group profiles in the Access Manager. I think the last straw was wanting to force us to license the entire suite regardless of whether we were using it or not. Personally, I never liked it because it wouldn't use SSSD or kclient/nsswitch and if some service tried to join the realm/domain, it'd join using the same computer accounts and basically break the account since Centrify used its own client, so you'd specifically need to join the computer accounts via Centrify as a different name. It wasn't detrimental or anything -- just annoying that it was a problem at all. Also, sometimes the user cache database saved in specific users' appdata that use Access Manager would corrupt from time to time and you'd need to manually delete it to use Access Manager. I'd hope they fixed that by now too though.
All and all, I'm not saying Active Directory isn't an excellent product because it is and I'm not saying that there is a 1:1 solution for Linux but I'm saying it that in my experience it isn't terrible either with FreeIPA and products you can use with it. I definitely hated other 389 solutions prior to FreeIPA though.
AD is easy top set up in Linux with a samba4 docker container. For instance: https://github.com/Fmstrat/samba-domain. Even HSS a script to easily join debian based machines.