Preparing to join an Active Directory domain

From what we have seen in Chapter 7, Implementing Windows Shares with Samba 4, using Samba to share files, we can understand that this is pretty impressive stuff. We always need to remind ourselves that this all comes without any price tag or the need of client access licenses.

Tip

Samba file sharing is free, that is, without cost and free in liberty; you can use it as you wish. This is the fundamental premise of open source software and is at the heart of Linux.

The big issue that may act as a potential deal breaker is the need to maintain user accounts on the RHEL server and the AD domain to which the workstation accessing the server belongs. If we implement more than one server, the problem is exacerbated with the need for accounts on each and every server as well as the AD domain. The simple solution is to incorporate the RHEL server into the AD domain and use AD accounts for resource access. In this way, we can use a single sign-on to the Active...