[luau] Red Hat vs. Mandrake vs. SuSE

W. Wayne Liauh LiauhW001 at Hawaii.rr.com
Thu Jul 18 08:37:00 PDT 2002


Does anyone care to differ from or comment on the following opinion? 
 Are they true (vis-a-vis Red Hat)?


"There are some reasons why Mandake would be more useful than Redhat on 
an existing Windows network, and they are:

1)LDAP-enabled samba RPMs are available for Mandrake 8.2, and may be in 
9.0 (there are some issues, since you can either have LDAP or not, and 
having an extra set for LDAP may be called bloat).

If you want to have a linux-based network with windows desktops, this is 
essential, as it is the best way to get PDC-BDC operation. That's what 
we use here

2)Out the box working winbind.

Winbind allows you to easily integrate linux boxes into an exisiting 
windows-based network, allowing you to use the accounts stored in 
windows domains etc for all authentication purposes. Linux boxes work 
just like any other domain member. Users can then log into any winbind 
box (depending on how you have set pam up) via any pam-capable service, 
which means that samba can serve them files, they can serve email, 
provide ssh logins, or allow users to login to X with their domain 
accounts.

Since 8.2 Mandrake has had winbind RPMS in the distro, with about 5 
steps necessary to use winbind ('urpmi samba-winbind', uncomment 3 lines 
in smb.conf and change the workgroup parameter to DOMAIN, join the 
domain with 'smbpasswd -j DOMAIN -U administrator', 'service winbind 
start', cp /etc/pam.d/system-auth-winbind /etc/pam.d/system-auth) and 
9.0 may have tools to allow any MCSE to set this up (as long as he is a 
Domain Admin in his network).

3)Out the box ACLs on XFS

Since 8.1 Mandrake has had ACLs available with samba, allowing windows 
users the same flexibilty in file permissions. AFAIK, no other distro 
has this out-the-box (maybe SuSE, I am not sure).

4)Frequently updated samba RPMs

The Mandrake samba maintainers almost always have RPMs for the current 3 
stable distros out within a few days of the source release of samba, 
available on ftp.samba.org or on their personal sites. (I happen to be 
one of them ;-)).

While samba may seem like a small package, and one that anyone could 
setup from source, there is a lot of experience that has gone into the 
samba RPMs. Just take a look at the example smb.conf shipped by 
Mandrake, and that shipped by Redhat, and you will see who is serious 
about displacing Windows boxen (examples that can just be uncommented to 
either make a winbind box or a Domain Controller with working profiles, 
login scripts and more), and who thinks samba is just a utility to allow 
users to share files on their own machines."




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