What I am looking for is a good tutorial and some advice from people who have done this before. I am not a linux guru but I can get around pretty well and I am not a network/sys admin. But I have been tasked with setting up Kerberos (or other) network authentication scheme among a group of Linux servers. The Linux boxes come in all shapes, sizes, and distributions. Mainly Slackware and CentOS.

1) Is there one or many implementations of kerberos on Linux and does it matter which one I choose?

2) I pretty sure I can figure out what I need on the CentOS side (using YUM) but on Slackware I will most likely be building from source. Is there a good tutorial for this?

3) I doubt I will have to deal with a windows box but I have heard that Linux / Windows kerberos are incompatible do to windows hijacking the standard. Is this still the case or can the two interact between each other.

thanks in advance

Doug

1: your distro should have an OpenLDAP package. Use that. It should add all of the KRB5 stuff as dependencies. Kerberos is implemented within OpenLDAP such that it's the fastest path to getting the job done.

2. There should be slackware packages for Openldap.

3. LDAP on Linux/Windows can interact nicely. It depends on what you want to do with Windows. Samba client and server are the way to interact with windows. There should be packages for that too.

Active Directory is a crack pipe that's hard to get off once you start. Maybe your superiors don't mind the escalating License costs. Ask because it takes time and effort to learn and deploy openldap/samba. If they don't care about the crack pipe just make your Linux servers samba clients to active directory. You'll be babysitting the Active Directory box far more than your servers. But there's nothing like job security eh?