I'm curious as to what are the current "best practices" when it comes to centralized administration of a network of Unix (primarily Linux, but not necessarily so) machines? Essentially, what is the equivalent of Active Directory for a network with one or more Unix hosts? The immediate answer I come up with would be something like OpenLDAP plus PAM but what I'm looking for is the suite of tools (GUI and CLI apps) for managing the directory, deploying software, centralizing sign-on and security, managing printers, etc. In a perfect world, I would like to centralize administration of Windows, Unix, and OS X machines via a single directory service, though I imagine such a solution would be expensive and/or cumbersome if it even existed. Or is this something Samba 4 will do?
posted by Imhotep is Invisible on Sep 9, 2009 - 5 answers

Using Windows to query Unix RPC rquota? [more inside]
posted by lundman on Mar 10, 2008 - 7 answers

Best *nix distro for SSH, RDC, router and print server. Or i could use windows if that would satisfy the conditions. [more inside]
posted by DJWeezy on Oct 11, 2007 - 17 answers

Help me troubleshoot performance issues with digital media sharing between two computers. [more inside]
posted by fsmontenegro on Jun 6, 2007 - 5 answers

Help me keep my Windows server from DoS'ing my nameserver! [more inside]
posted by Loto on Jul 27, 2006 - 6 answers

Need a tinker-free Linux/MySql install for Ruby On Rails. Also, seeking advice for getting started in RoR. [more inside]
posted by Afroblanco on Jun 27, 2006 - 19 answers

Um, oops.
So I changed my disk partition a bit, changing my big data drive to a 'logical' partition of the same file-type (without changing the start or endpoint of the partition), and now Windows isn't recognizing it... Is there a good way to undo this horrible thing? The data should definitely still be there - no actual formatting occurred, just a changing of the partition table. Is there a way to undo this?
posted by kaibutsu on Feb 13, 2005 - 3 answers

Question re: DOS/Windows equivalents to Unix commands (more inside). [more inside]
posted by plep on Aug 6, 2004 - 10 answers