I am working on a project for college and part of it is to plan and set up (in VMs) a network for a business of roughly 50 people with Windows PCs.
The network must include a file server with roaming profiles and dedicated storage space for each employee as well as backup. This would be done with Active Directory and a Domain Controller which I know is a windows server killer app.
My question is if this would all be possible to do on Linux based server(s). I have tried doing some research on this but I haven’t been able to find anything conclusive. I am familiar with making file servers with Linux however, more advanced server configuration in Linux is new to me.
I know that a lot of my class mates will be using windows based servers (We were taught in windows server 2012) but I would like to expand my knowledge of Linux and I see this as a good opportunity to do so.
Yeah. Microsoft’s Active Directory is LDAP and Kerberos rolled into one (easily setup on Unix/Unix-like systems), plus some DNS stuff.
Roaming profiles would be tricky, but definitely doable. Startup scripts that mount network shares or other drives, for example.
Dedicated storage space, I’d set up NFS on the server and call it a day. For a backup you could use bacula or rsync. Get as sophisticated as you want.
You could have DNS server and LDAP server, then a file server for the user profiles/user data and file shares, and a backup server to push everything to at night, once an hour, whatever.
in practice people end up with their Linux Kerberos and ldap and storage and their Windows Kerberos and ldap and storage in separate domains and tons of glue scripts and helper web apps to synchronize the two.
For learning purposes try both Windows and Linux setups.
Also, while technically possible to run storage and user accounts (ldap,Kerberos,dns) services on the same machine, try doing it separately. And try mixing and matching Linux and Windows servers and client machines – for learning purposes it’s just more realistic.