[aklug] heading towards a windows domain

From: Jim Dory <jdory@nomealaska.org>
Date: Tue Dec 02 2008 - 11:32:32 AKST

Hello listers,

I've been away a long time (subscribed back in '05) but just thought I
would throw out a question (or two). Then I may not hang around long
since I'm not in Anchorage and other reasons.

We are looking at going to another level on our peer-to-peer network
here a the city of Nome. I've managed our network by installing
fileshare/email/web servers running Centos 4 over the last several
years. Since this isn't in my area of expertise - we hired a consulting
firm to assess our current networking state and make recommendations to
move forward in a few areas. We need to improve our backup for
users/servers, add some redundancy, improve performance, etc. None of
this is in my job description.

Our consultants have recommended moving to MS Active Directory as a
solution to some issues we are having. Part of what is driving this is
our finance and clerk departments are looking at some fairly expensive
finance and customer biling type software packages that are Windows
server based. (I have looked for opensource packages and have been
underwhelmed by my googling - but suspect there may be good ones out
there undiscovered by me).

I can see advantages to having AD services (or ldap) for managing users
with things like adding printers to desktops, guests/consulting policies
for improved security/ease of configuring - but am not that familiar
with capabilities of it. Our Cisco firewall apparently interfaces with
AD for configuring things like VPN policies and whatnot - no idea if it
works with opensource but suspect it does in that regard.

I've done all user configs by hand - there's not that many users here
and we really don't need much more complexity - but we also need to
perhaps be able to outsource some IT stuff since I doubt we will be able
to afford a full time position any time soon. Perhaps some things we can
do will facilitate that.

So the conversation I'm seeking is how the sys-admins of this group feel
about this direction we are heading. Not sure I can sell open source
finance packages but we are looking at a lot of tax payer money to
purchase the proprietary systems. But if there are viable options out
there I'm not aware of.. with some kind of support options. Also - how
do you feel about MS Active Directory or how would opensource versions
(OpenLDAP?) be able to replace or interface with what we may end up
doing (windows servers/apps)? We are standardized right now on WinXP for
desktops - hard to know if I can get linux going there or not since
people seem to be somewhat change intolerant. We would need a database
designer to get us off MS Access - the biggest need I see right now
besides familiarity with MS Office. Are there good support services in
Anchorage should we go any opensource solution vs. AD?

Apologies for the rambling nature of this and perhaps it is inevitable
that we go the windows way and hire on our current consultants for
support/services. But am curious about current thoughts on this if
anyone is willing.

cheers, JD

-- 
Jim Dory
Engineering
City of Nome
PO Box 281
102 Division St.
Nome, AK 99762
907.443.6604
http://www.nomealaska.org
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Received on Tue Dec 2 11:33:16 2008

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