Introduction

If you have worked in corporate environments, then you are probably familiar with a directory service such as Active Directory. What you may not realize is that Samba, originally created to be an open source implementation of Windows file sharing (SMB/CIFS), can now operate as an Active Directory compatible directory service. It can even act as a Backup Domain Controller (BDC) in an Active Directory domain. In this chapter, we will configure Samba to centralize authentication for your network services. We will also configure a Linux client to leverage it for authentication and set up a RADIUS server, which uses the directory server for authentication.