I’ve been asked to develop an enterprise level of complex network servers that can provide many services including mail server, ftp, web server, file server, print server, backup server, roaming profiles and user’s home directory.. etc. The client demanded at least one Linux machine regardless of the service running on it. I’ve decided to run the web server (Apache) on it associated with the FTP server for managing the web pages contents, so I had to come out with a solution to join the Linux server to the Domain Controller (which is windows server 2003) as a member server.

It is true that any number of Samba servers can normally be set up in a Windows network without joining them to a domain. However, advantages of domain membership are central management, authentication and single sign-on. So once you’ve done with all the configuration and successfully joined the server to the DC you can use the same account name and password to log on to your Linux or Windows machine as well as the network administrators will be able to logon to the machine with their administrator credentials. (more…)