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

What were your greatest victories and punishing woes as a unix/linux system administrator? [more inside]
posted by Myles on Jul 21, 2008 - 11 answers

How do I get the correct return code from a unix command line application after I've piped it through another command that succeeded? [more inside]
posted by ChrisR on Nov 24, 2007 - 22 answers

Years of Linux experience, but looking for training on Solaris and AIX without having to relearn the basics [more inside]
posted by tkolstee on Mar 1, 2007 - 5 answers

I am looking for information on setting LDAP based netgroups for a fedora core multi-user environment. We are currently using a listfile setup, but would like to migrate to LDAP. I have a couple of books and searched all over google, but have not found a good tutorial to do this. Nate
posted by dyno04 on Jun 1, 2006 - 1 answer

Where's a good all purpose reference site for administering a Unix server (a Raq4 if it makes any difference). I've read the manual and thus have the basics, but having absolutely no grounding in Unix, simple tasks take a lot of blundering around Google hoping to hit the right keyword.

For example; it took me a good half hour (twenty minutes search and ten minutes working out how to use Vi (have since discovered Pico) to keep my log files for more than a week (rotate was set to 1 in logrotate.conf)
posted by Hartster on Aug 17, 2004 - 4 answers