Originally posted by: Brazen
Thanks drag, I did not know about those Debian support options, unfortunately we don't have HPs and I don't trust some guy consultanting. I was a little terse with my reasoning though, I suppose. I also liked that Ubuntu had newer packages, but once Etch goes Stable, than that won't be so (only considering the LTS releases for Ubuntu). I have also been thinking (and hoping for) the exact same thing you mention with integration between server and client. Maybe not so much like SBS, but like Active Directory at least, for Linux. I've been hoping for that from the FOSS community for a long time, actually. Something that can push out software and policies to linux member servers.
I see Ubuntu as especially poised to fill that role. Though frankly, I don't think they have the manpower to make such a thing happen on their own. I think they was have to rely on a big showing of volunteer developer support for such a thing which so far has not happened.
You'll probably most likely see a domain desktop/server integration coming out of Fedora. They have their stateless Linux project and they have their Fedora Directory system (open source ldap).
Personally I used Xen + Debian + Kerberos + OpenLDAP + OpenSSL to setup a AD-style SSO domain before, for evaluation. Used SSL encrypted OpenLDAP with Kerberos and it worked pretty well. No patching was needed or anything. Also integrated OpenAFS for file serving.
Since then I've blown it all away. I think this weekend I want to work on taking my notes and figuring out a proper tutorial on how to setup a evaluation system using Vservers (much lower resource usage then Xen. You need VM for proper setup on small amounts of machines as in the real world you will idealy want to use seperate physical servers for each service for security reasons).
I also want to explore integrating CFengine and Samba. I don't know what to do about email or whatnot. Maybe take a look at Webdav and integrating that with SSO/LDAP for maybe a collaberation documentation and versioning service. But these things I will only look at once I get the basic setup going.
All of this should be workable using the default packages aviable to Debian Etch. I would also like to produce a couple working Qemu images (one image full of vserver for the service side and another image for emulating multiple clients) so people can look at working examples.
This sort of thing is pretty workable once you get it going, but the pain (especially with OpenLDAP) is getting a initial configuration running correctly. books and documentation tend to concentrate on what you can do after you get it running, not the basic steps for getting it going in the first place.