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Mister IT Guru
Asked: 2011-07-18 01:25:46 +0800 CST

Apple Open Directory and FOSS desktops

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Is it possible, (seeing as Apple Open Directory is LDAP), to manage the users names and passwords for Ubuntu and Fedora based systems?

ubuntu mac-osx-server fedora

2 Answers

  1. Sure. All you need to do is store the relevant objectClasses in your Apple Open Directory, and configure your systems to use LDAP to login in the usual fashion.

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  2. Best Answer

    You can even use the normal OD user created for AFP and SMB use out of the box, without any change to the OD schemas. You just have to compensate for the somewhat unusual home directory path listed in OD. When you use networked home folders for AFP clients with a share on the OS X server, it will look like

    /Network/Servers/servername/Users/username

    For user home directories to work in this case, you have to either mount your NFS home share to /Network/Servers/servername/Users or create a symlink to your /home directory at this place.

    One drawback to this easy approach is that you need Kerberos to change passwords from the Linux side if they need to be kept in sync with the Apple side, as the normal LDAP password change operation won't be working.

    Both the homedir and the password problems are irrelevant if you have a separate userbase for the Linux clients.

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