Hi Davide, thanks for checking in.
I guess I am considering ns7, though I haven’t really been concerned about a supported distro. We use the basics, DNS, DHCP, NTP, SMB, GPO, ADDC, MySql. all of which has been baked into Centos til this issue with samba-dc. We started with centos 4 and samba3 nt4 domains, then built a centos6 with samba4.whatever build sernet last released as open source. Webmin, whatever desktop, bash and rsync is plenty for our admin access. Truth is we hardly ever touch it, and the hardware we have it on barely runs at idle. We’ll probably run our next DC on a windows 10 hyper-v instance on a low power server, and maybe spin a backup DC on a cloud instance.
We have a couple of dozen windows desktops authenticating from a single physical location. We install a handful of apps on them with Group Policy, and set a few things like dsn’s and drive mappings, and we value centralized acl management. We have maybe a scant TB of files, mostly photos and video. The whole thing is behind a fire wall. Our email, backups, most of our shared files are mostly with google/ g-suite and and a hosted web server off-site which has cpanel and runs drupal and civicrm.
Our client hardware is any-old used $100 dell desktop with windows 10. We need windows for our in-house vba apps, quickbooks, adobe. When one craps out, we drop another on the user, join the domain, pull the memory and a few parts out of the machine and recycle it.
Our hardware is a 10 or 12 year old xeon superserver, which really needs replacing. It burns like 400 watts at idle, and sounds like a leaf blower. I figured we’d skip a generation, go to centos 8 since we’ve never really been able to get past the REHL7 / samba 4-dc / mit vs Heimdal thing for the DC.
Of course, even though we’re fairly snug behind the firewall, I shouldn’t be running unpatched apps, and I don’t really want to build my own Samba. so I should have a provider for samba security updates.
I think the conclusions of your users, above describes us also. I understand that those of us who are interested in an opensource alternative for domain authentication and provisioning of windows desktops are by definition technically capable, low profit, avoiding spending thousands a year to support through a var. I get that larger companies like MS, RH, Samba+ aren’t interested in supporting us.
I’m glad Nethserver is focused on the small business market, and I’d be glad to go with NethServer. I may be able to contribute a bit to the community as well.
How did you get around the ADDC thing with Centos 7?