[CentOS] Re: Re: A good primer to User Administration?

Wed Nov 14 05:19:45 UTC 2007
Eric B. <ebenze at hotmail.com>

"Craig White" <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote in 
message news:1195007481.9807.13.camel at lin-workstation.azapple.com...
>> > 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.

> ----
> 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

Wow - thanks for the link.  Definitely an interesting point of view to read. 
I'd be curious to see how well Zimbra holds up if I even choose to go that 
route.  There are other OSS Groupware servers out there as well, but Zimbra 
did seem interesting, and their purchase by Yahoo gives them a little more 
credibility in my books.  But again, this is a "down-the-road" thing for me.


> 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.

Agreed - MS has done a great job of putting a server for network dummies 
package with their AD system.  But the truth is that I am not looking for 
that; I was the control and flexibility that RH / OSS offers and not be 
stuck with the MS way or no way.


> 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.

Agreed; once again I'm not looking for a wizard (although it would be nice! 
:) ).  Rather, I'm looking for some reference material to better understand 
how all these different systems mesh together, and how to get the login 
(kerberos ?) system to work with LDAP to work with NFS, ACLs, SFTP, etc, 
etc, etc.  I seem to have trouble finding reference material for "server 
farm" rollouts - most of the material I find is all geared towards 
standalone machines.


> 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.

Thanks for the tip; I'll take a look into it and see what I can pick up from 
it!

Eric