# Network services advice



## synack (Aug 19, 2012)

Hi Everyone,

I'm doing a project for a charity in Australia (free of charge) and am helping them design a new network. They have zero I.T budget so I am using Free and OpenSource software and donated hardware. What I'm looking for is a *NIX equivalent of Active Directory or something similar. What I'm looking at is one central FreeBSD server doing most of the heavy lifting and the client machines will be running Fedora (about 10 of them). The server will also be running a MySQL database with a Java front end. I'd like for users to be able to log into any of the terminals and have the same environment they would have on any other machine. I'm also looking at NFS so each user can have personal centralised storage. I'm no-where near a FreeBSD guru which is the main reason I'm asking for advice on this.

Any advice would be appreciated,

synack.


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## SirDice (Aug 19, 2012)

synack said:
			
		

> What I'm looking for is a *NIX equivalent of Active Directory or something similar.


Active Directory is basically the bastard child of LDAP, Kerberos and DNS. Kerberos may be a little over the top for your situation but with LDAP you can set up a centralized accounts database. DNS and DHCP will take care of the networking bit. 

LDAP Authentication


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