In many enterprises, Linux and Windows now live together in peace. Very often, heterogeneous networks rely on Windows-dominated office software and traditional Unix-style servers. The Active Directory service, which Microsoft introduced with Windows 2000 Server, is often used for centralized user information management.

Linux typically uses the legacy /etc/passwd system or a distributed solution such as NIS or LDAP, but if you are willing to configure a number of freely available tools and components, you can easily integrate your Linux systems into the Active Directory infrastructure.

In this article, I assume that you have an Active Directory server that manages a complete domain structure on Windows. With this, I'll show you how to configure your Linux clients to log in (authenticate), gain access (authorize), and leverage the domain infrastructure. The icing on the cake is single sign-on functionality, and the cherry on top is the ability to automatically create user directories on the client side.

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