Second attempt at posting as the switch in using an underscore to a 
period in our mail addresses confuses the listserv into thinking I'm not 
a list subscriber.

On 09/02/2014 6:17 PM, John Stewart wrote:
> On 09/02/2014 2:45 PM, ToddAndMargo wrote: Thank you for the offer. 
> Got me to thinking. Whenever I come across a Windows Active Directory 
> (AD) server, I think under my breath "Why would you do that to 
> yourself?". What a slow, cumbersome, clunky mess. Within the first ten 
> minutes of discussing a Windows server with a client, I inevitably get 
> asked how to speed it up. I have to tell then that that is just the 
> animal they are dealing with. If I can set up a Windows server with 
> the least amount of services running on it, I do. I love it when they 
> don't want AD. (Most of my customers seldom have more than five 
> workstations.)
>
> Active Directory would be overkill for five workstations, but for 
> large organizations Active Directory is a key part of your IT 
> infrastructure.   Integrating our SL5 Sun Ray thin client servers with 
> the AD domain managed by our central computing department was a huge 
> step forward.  This enabled our students and instructors to use the 
> same login and password they use to access centrally managed services 
> and the first time they login their Linux home directory is 
> automatically created.
>
>  Okay, I do realize that Linux's stability and practicality is far 
> superior to Redmond's stuff, which is why I prefer Linux.
>
> That's the way I felt when I managed the Solaris based Unix systems in 
> our central computing department but my recent experience has been 
> that our Windows 2008 Terminal Server machines are more reliable than 
> our SL5 Sun Ray servers.  It's not a hardware difference since both 
> sets of servers run on the same type of hardware.
>
>  I see Linux as pretty much customer driven, as opposed to driven by 
> the greatest, most effective marketing department in the history of 
> free enterprise. Question: what do you see as an advantage of Samba's 
> AD over just using Samba as an old fashioned Domain Controller? I take 
> it old-out-of-date (SL) isn't supporting Samba 4 yet.
>
> Samba 3 has had it's day in the sun but it doesn't cut it for 
> supporting Windows 7 clients.  We're dealing with a wacky situation in 
> another department where the previous IT support person declined to 
> simply join Windows 7 clients to the centrally managed AD domain.  
> What he did instead is use Microsoft Hyper-V to create an SL6 virtual 
> machine on a pair of Windows 2008 terminal servers (ironically part of 
> the centrally managed AD domain) and install Samba 4 to create his own 
> AD domain to support Windows 7 clients in the department.
>