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Joining Ubuntu To AD

Chrissy LeMaire shows us how to connect to AD from Ubuntu:

Since 2009, it seems that a couple things have changed in the client realm. In particular, winbindfell out of favor to Likewise Open (which I used to <3) which was bought by BeyondTrust and turned into PowerBroker Open. But that’s since fallen out of favor to the SSSD or “System Security Services Daemon“. SSSD seems pretty cool but everyone hates its name and assume that its name is keeping it from greater adoption.

Sometimes when researching SSSD, you’ll come across a few mentions of FreeIPA which is similar to Active Directory, OpenLDAP, and ApacheDS. Oh, and I recently found out thatSamba4 allows Linux servers to join Active Directory as Domain Controllers (!!) but I can’t tell if it can be a forest of its own (reddit review here).

There are other players I’m leaving out but after a bit of casual research, no others seem to stand out. Ultimately, while there are a number of ways to setup AD/Linux authentication with Ubuntu, it appears that SSSD is the current way to go. Let’s go ahead and set that up.

Cf Ryan Adams and LeMaire’s separate posts back in March on the topic.  As Microsoft gets serious about Linux integration, I would love to see them simplify this process significantly, either by updating an existing open-source project (my preference) or creating their own open-source project.