The goal is the so-called “multi-site”, the ability to share and consume users and groups accounts between multiple NethServer installations.
Today on ns6, we have NethServer joined to an Active Directory domain in Samba ADS mode. We have some limitations: only some services are configured to work with it. Moreover the web UI does not show AD accounts at all. The underlying architecture suffers of years of adjustments and there are 3 user databases to keep aligned. The implementation and the configuration is very complex, I was saying at least 4K lines of code…
Tomorrow on ns7 the users and groups will be provided by an Active Directory infrastructure (“native” by MS, or implemented by the nsdc container). We could also support OpenLDAP or any other backend (FreeIPA) allowed by the sssd infrastructure.
Going further, we could also allow multiple account backends at the same time. We can even suppose a single mail server for multiple organizations!