On Wed, 2007-11-14 at 10:11 +1000, redhat@mckerrs.net wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric B." ebenze@hotmail.com To: centos@centos.org Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 9:58:15 AM (GMT+1000) Australia/Brisbane Subject: [CentOS] Re: A good primer to User Administration?
"Shibu C Varughese" shibucv@itmission.org wrote in message news:4739E414.4060504@itmission.org...
My question is the following. I've been searching online for a
good
reference to describe good practices when building a linux network,
but
haven't really been able to find much when it comes to best
practices for
user administration, ACLs, "optimal" (or recommended) file
locations,
etc. For example, I know I need an LDAP server, but not sure how
that
ties into system login, or how to use a Linux LDAP server as the
basis
for a primary domain controller (is it still called that given
Windows AD
world?), etc. Or even how to properly create group structures and
ACLs
that accurately reflect group ownership/etc. The octal permissions
at
the file level are only good enough for a single group; I need to
give
multiple groups different permissions on the same files, etc.
I realize that there are a lot of questions that I need to
research, but
I was hoping someone could point me in the direction of some
advanced
admin docs with best practices, etc. Most of the stuff I find
relates on
how to set up a basic standalone PC, without any reference to how
to
network together a bunch of servers running off central
authentication,
etc...
Eric,
if you are thinking of setting up ldap, email, address book ...etc..
all
in one go ... then you need to test out ...something like zimbra
from
zimbra.com
Thanks for the input; I have already looked at Zimbra, and it looks like a very interesting soln for me once I have everything else set up. I see Zimbra as a nice group-ware pkg, but not as something to help me with user-authentication to the server (for shell access), setting up file permissions, shares, SMB permissions/shares, etc, etc, etc.
Tx!
I'll vote for zimbra too, has been brilliant for me. It is sort of appliance like in that you typically don't need to do much to a server to turn it into a working system. Mine runs as a Xen VM and I'll soon (5.1) be clustering it.
As far as tutorials go, I found that http://howtoforge.com/ is an excellent source of such types of articles.
---- Now I know that there are a few Zimbra users on this list - probably most of them won't agree with the author of my link below whom I think it can be determined was not very happy with Zimbra...
http://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/pipermail/info-cyrus/2007-November/027543.html
cyrus-imapd is used by some serious mail administrators so the discussions on this list tend to be technical.
I have no experience with Zimbra so I am incapable of adding to the discussion but thought the link to a different point of view should be offered.
To the OP...
Linux by it's nature doesn't necessarily lend itself to a turnkey solution - at least not Red Hat (or CentOS by inference), nor the other Linux distributions.
Obviously Microsoft has done an excellent job at exploiting this weakness.
I suppose you could fool with Sun's various services, Novell offers similar, and I suppose so does Red Hat but none are fully integrated and lead you through wizard-wize from start to finish and setup an entire network infrastructure.
What I found that worked for me was to learn LDAP and the book that made it happen for me was 'LDAP System Administration by Gerald Carter' While this book is getting old and out of date, it actually makes LDAP very clear and once you get the basic idea of LDAP down, then adding everything else to it (samba/windows networking, cups, various authentication services) all become obvious. There are no magic tools that teach you LDAP - you can't install some GUI thing and understand what is going on...it doesn't happen that way.
Craig