Fighting the FUD - Deploying Novell's Linux Server in a Windows Domain Environment
Friday, March 25 2005 @ 08:32 PM EST Contributed by: glosser
FlexBeta offers this tutorial on how to use SUSE as a PDC(Primary Domain Controller) for a Windows network.
With all the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) still being generated relating to GNU/Linux not being a viable Operating System for Authentication/File serving, along with all the email I receive asking how to setup a Samba server as a replacement for a Windows 2003 Server, I have decided to write a small article showing the steps to utilize Novell's SLES9 (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) as a Primary Domain Controller for a Windows Network.
In a previous article here on flexbeta, titled "SLES9 vs Win2k3" you find that for a small LAN, SLES9 not only outperforms Windows 2003, but it is also available at a fraction of the cost. In that article, I utilized a small SCSI based server for performance testing, which showed SLES9 had nearly twice the performance of Win2k3. After further testing on high-end Intel based servers (Dell PowerEdge 2600 Dual Xeon Proc. with 5 - 15K SCSI drives - 4 GB RAM), I still find SLES9 outperforms Windows 2003 for Windows File Serving on every RAID configuration, although the performance difference dropped to SLES9 only being about 25% faster than Win2k3 on higher end server hardware. So, for performance alone, many companies (who will spend thousands of dollars on hardware for a small increase of performance) should be adopting GNU/Linux Servers, but unfortunately, most are not. The FUD machine is apparently still very strong.
For the most part all of the FUD that is being generated today is related to the fact most Network Administrators think that it is too hard for anyone to install a Linux based server as a Windows Authentication/File Server, let alone maintain one. Where is all of this FUD coming from, well a lot of it is coming from Microsoft and other entities that have a vested interest in keeping Open Source Software (OSS) out of the Server space, but some of it is still being generated from the Linux/OSS/Free Software community itself, as you can see in articles like this from slashdot.org.
To fight all of this FUD, this article will try to show you how EASY it is to setup Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server as a Window Domain Controller - all by just pointing an clicking - no text editor is required. After implementing these instructions, you will have a fully featured Windows Primary Domain Controller that includes setting up an LDAP user/machine database as well as utilizing Dynamic DHCP and DNS Servers.
