Active Directory / LDAP Plugin [$120]

Dear elementary community. I call upon your collective awesomeness to make a plugin I wish that I myself could make.

I wish there was a plugin for the settings panel, that would allow you to join to a windows domain or ldap directory. Something that would just work, something that was easy, something that was ELEMENTARY !

It would also change the needed settings so you can login to the computer via your domain/ldap credentials.

Please make this happen. Uber programmers you are needed !

I think this is something that would really help set elementary apart. Because through all my time distro hopping. I have not seen something simple built in to the OS. Theres always something to go download, a config file to edit, or something else. And I don't believe those things are necessarily hard, but rather tedious and unwarranted extra work. I believe I should be able to walk my mom through it, over the phone. Windows can do it, why not us? Anyway, I am hoping this gets noticed and some body feels the same way and has the skill set to implement it.

Something like easy to setup Connection to Windows Domain or LDAP would probably boost elementary to a top place of interest for company computers. And even small home networks!

So I throw a few bucks at this. :D

To be honest, I think that is a feature elementary does not need at this moment. The software that is already shipped with elementary OS is not stable and sophisticated enough for enterprise use - elementary itself is not enterprise-ready and I do not think that is the eOS developers' target audience. Before we waste required development time on wishes like these, we should improve the operating system's core.

One more thing: Ubuntu and Debian itself are pretty bad at that topic - There is no native solution to managing the services (Kerberos, PAM, etc). Just some open-source solutions by third party companies (Mint does use one of that). So, there is no simple "settings" page we could write. We would need a much more sophisticated solution and I don't think the eOS developers have spare time for that topic.

For using Linux in enterprise environments (and Active Directory), you should probably look into Red Hat based distributions.

Marvin I can understand what your saying. I don't' disagree, except with the redhat part, dont want red hat.

If we don't dream big, and start somewhere, it just wont happen. So I made a bug report and posted a bounty. Its a start. Not saying its going to happen tmrw. It will take time.

This wont just effect "Enterprise" Business deployments. It could effect, small businesses, home networks, colleagues, various universities where you need to authenticate against a network.

I have a dream. That dream involves linux, and easy to use network authentication for all.
Its something elementary could one day offer that no ones else really is at the moment for linux.
Red Hats not bad, just not what I call simple, or elementary. As I see it, the world of linux needs elementary.

If someone doesn't stand up and start the process and say they want something different who will?

Darrell,

of course you can post a bug report and a bounty - I just wanted to explain to you why this is something the eOs developer team most likely will not work on. And to be honest, "starting the process" with 10 bucks and a bug report ... Well, you could start working on it yourself if you want it badly. Managing Kerberos, PAM and LDAP is something that has to be implemented well because login is such a critical security situation.

To be honest, I do not see the use cases you mentioned: For small businesses eOS ist both not stable and secure enough to use (at least as a sys admin I would not suggest using a distribution such as eOS for that case). Who has an Active Directory domain running in their home network? The overlap between "elementary OS users" and "Active Directory home domain" is most likely a number between 0 and 50. Where are these domains running on anyway?

And what university IT staff makes Active Directory login available to untrusted computers? That's just realy bad practice and nothing that should be supported.

https://www.bountysource.com/issues/6598900-active-directory-ldap-plugin