When I arrived at my current position, our environment existed almost exclusively of Windows servers. However, I am a big fan of using Linux for certain applications, like the webgallery I was asked to set up, a simple SFTP server, Nagios for monitoring etc.
I do fine setting these up, but not being the Linux expert, I am not sure how to properly join these servers to the domain and was therefor wondering what procedures or guidelines other people follow.
We often use ping -a to quickly figure out the hostname of a certain server, but this does not seem to work for the linux machines, most likely because of the whole WINS/NetBios thing I assume.
I just joined one server to the domain, but probably missed something cause it's not working even after a dnsflush. Next to that, the couple procedures I've found so far are pretty extensive and most of the time don't seem worth the time. Best case scenario, I download some kind of client (smbclient?), enter the domain name and maybe the server to use, supply an administrator password and that's it. Is that possible at all?
Thanks
Personally for a low number of Linux servers I wouldn't join them to the domain. If you and a couple of admins are going to be the only ones logging into the server itself, creating accounts on the couple of servers won't take long. The for the applications that run on the server, try to pick ones with ldap support if you want people to log into the applications that run no these servers using their AD credentials.
As far as getting the names to resolve properly, I would just manually create the DNS entries as A records using the DNS console on the AD server.