Kris,

With Novell/Microsoft systems that give the illusion of being managable by the
average secretary, you pay up front for the illusion of simplification; for
the programming team at Microsoft to make the majority of the difficult
decisions for you.  This may be good, but when things start to go wrong that
secretary isn't going to be much use.  In fact, this sounds like one of those
setups for "oh, that stopped working six backup cycles ago, we didn't think we
needed it", an of course now all configuration and authentication data is
hosed and the whole system has to be rebuilt from scratch...

With Linux, there's no illusion.  You know up front that the secretary can't
administer it, instead of putting your money into the product license, you put
it into hiring and training someone competent who's job it is to understand
the network.  I think it's better for a business to own their own intellectual
capital rather than to just trust MS.  (Note that this is a problem with
products like RedHat raising their prices to be in line with Microsoft
products.  If you need to pay both the license and the secretary vs. the
license, the secretary, and the guru, guess which product gets the job?)

The reason to keep your authentication at very low level, text based if
possible, is that if things have gone wrong it's easier to get in and build it
up layer by layer.  On a system where you need the full GUI to do basic
administration, a bad system crash may mean you can never get the system up
that far.  Same thing if you have to administer it from a remote console -
what if it's not feeling well enough to talk with the console?