Novell rant, and other assorted Linux rants

[Brian Kelsay]

Brian Densmore wrote:

>>    
>>
>IIRC, Mandrake ships with LDAP enabled, and will install Samba.
>I don't know what PDC is (Promiscuous Data Compression?). I once
>looked at using LDAP in Mandrake to do something with security. I 
>didn't spend too much time on it though as I found LDAP to be
>to arcane. I'm not sure what you are looking to do, but why
>do you need Samba+PDC+LDAP. Why not just Samba? It's easy enough
>to set up that a 'secretary' could do it. Usually the simplest
>answer is the correct one. Don't add complexity unless you
>really need it.  ;)
>
>  
>
A PDC is a Primary Domain Controller.  In an NT 3.51 or 4.0 network, you 
get ONE PDC and as many BDCs as you want (Backup Domain Controllers).  
Usually, you will put one BDC at each remote location and you might put 
one in a department that has a slow link to the rest of the network, 
probably want to put them on a VLAN also.  All this is old news.  With 
Active Directory (based on X.509 standard, loosely, which is the 
standard for (L)DAP deployment and Novell's NDS also follows this) each 
of those PDC and BDC units become a DC or Domain controller.  Same job, 
just more equal.  The box you created the directory is still supposed to 
be special though.  I think you can only make Schema changes from this 
box.  It might be limited to a couple of situations, e.g. merging 
forests or renaming the Schema.  This could possibly happen if a company 
changed names and you wanted to reflect this in the Schema naming or if 
two companies merged and again you want to reflect this in the schema or 
make services available to the newly merged company.  Think about HP and 
Compaq merging.

Yes, this is all arcane.  That doesn't mean outdated, just difficult.  
Es muy difficile.  A guy might want to set this up at home to learn 
about it and add to his/her skills.  I would.  On my list of stuff to do.

-- 
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Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.