The little guys win again

Yeah, we finally had success joining the organization's multi-domain forest from a linux server.  Now the standard SAMBA stuff would probably work as well, but we found a company called LikeWise (likewise.com) that specializes in connecting unixy OS's to Active Directory.  The core component has been open sourced and I know the SAMBA people are looking to add many of it's functions.  It can really replace the stock Winbind and obsolete the idmapper.  It can eliminate our complex configuration of needing to talk to both AD and a separate LDAP server, or to extend the AD schema for unix.

In other words, the LikeWise folks understand that many of us are stuck out in the leaves of the organization and really can't make changes to the core infrastructure.  We have had vendors ask us to change registry settings on the Domain controllers - Ha, fat chance of that happening without a full code review, security analysis and Microsoft's blessing (that's what big organizations do to cover themselves).  

So, there is still a lot of work left to do, but at least we can see light at the end of the Active Directory tunnel.  

Now for the bad news.  We need to switch to linux and abandon opensolaris and ZFS.  I won't be sorry to see opensolaris go, but ZFS is quite nice.  Well, there is one other development that I can't talk about yet, but a white knight might come riding in and take us out of build it yourself mode.