That's a matter of setting autofs to automount the path that you get back from LDAP as your home directory when you attempt to access it. While that may be his use case, to me the two things are quite distinct. You can automount NFS directories without any use of LDAP or NIS and you can use LDAP for authentication and authorization without NFS. (We used to use the /net/<server_name>/ path for those types of automounts.)

Mr. Englander's HOWTO is missing some steps. Fat Of The Lan also has LDAP installation instructions that have the steps that Mr. Englander was missing. I'm writing up the combination for a fresh install as I go.

If what I get works, I'll post the working steps somewhere. This isn't scratching any of my itches, other than to prove to myself that you don't need PAM to use LDAP for centralized user management. (At least that's what I intend to prove to myself. Maybe I'm wrong and you can't. We didn't need it for NIS/NIS+ when I used this stuff in Nortel.)

Central authentication requires NFS in the sense that user's home directories can easily be shared on the server. On Slackware I only got the NIS/NFS combination to work. Here's a HOWTO I wrote about the subject:

http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:network_services:roaming_profiles

What I'd like to be able to do:

1. Replace NIS with LDAP.
2. Have something more secure than NIS.

Cheers,

Niki

And I am not disagreeing with that, as far as it goes.

Databases are horribly overused, and in general I would say you should not use them where something more robust will work, particularly if this in the context of critical stuff.

That's always the theory, in practice I find that results are much more mixed. Abstraction layers have the potential to reduce maint costs, but that potential is not always actual, and not always worth the hassle.

System login being so clearly a critical system my gut is to avoid unnecessary abstractions or complications of any type.

Yes. It took me to a previous page of the thread. I scrolled down most of the page to find a post by the username you cited, but it was a short one, two lines I think, and did not appear to be what you were referencing.

I agree Brian, but let me ask this question: do few people use Slackware mostly for one (few) home workstations or hobby because it's "so" or because it's hard to integrate and "sell" to the hierarchy because if things like PAM being a PITA or simply not just out of the box ?

I'm in a case similar to Kikinovak: I love slackware for my personal usage, and I love it to install "my" servers... But in the real life, first I had to "fight" the Debian ones laughing at Slackware with all the usual attacks: only one guy maintaining it, you have to do it all by hand, etc. etc... Each time there's a missing package required, my colleagues, who are simply not my friends but in their perspective in a kind of "competition" are using that as if it was a professional mistake to have chooser Slackware ("If you had a package manager that would have not happen" (1) ). Then you have to handle several account on several machine for a whole team, on top of that, you have most (if not all) of your colleagues using Windows, because we can't do another way in my line of work (well theoretically, we could, I'd like, and I'd be ready to work for that but for now I've always be alone on working on that cross platform solutions). Basically, we create "mainstream client application" (Video games in short) and all artists uses Cubase, Photoshop, we need tools only on windows (sometimes on mac for a few years)... And on top of that in those tiny structures, no money to pay a sys admin, so at the end of the days it's "me"... The main senior developer who need to do that. And any "failure" or tiny problem is a surface attack to any "hard headed colleagues" who's ready to do anything to "push you out". (Yes you know those kind of people are not rare, and more, I'd say that in the recent generations, it's not uncommon to see freshly out of school people being sarcastic, critics even insulting on "old senior" only because "they have their PhD and they don't need to learn anything from others, they "merit" a big salary and so on... Trust me I've encountered too much of those guys later years... Simply Sharks... But hey, sharks are human too... well you know what I mean )

At the end of the day (or those years), I'm in a situaion similar to Kikinovac, maybe with more professional problems: being the only one real linux "expert" (=> understanding how system works), having a lot of "doctors" knowing unix only through debian, and most of them CLI haters, so basically "point and click" administrators... How do you think "knowledge missing people" (understand, investors, non technical top hierarchy) will react to those kind of situation ? One way, some "proud doctor" explaining that things would be better on a cloud, externalizing stuff like git and so on, less work, less costs, more money, versus a "old timer" who think a company should "own" those services and skills to be independent and more powerful on the long duration... Guess what, "the cloud" and "kiddie GUIS" win...

Don't get me wrong, I love Slackware (and don't want anything else for my own computer - beside Windows I'm requested to have for a "market" reason). I also love CLI, and sys admin, as in my approach, a real developer SHOULD know how a computer work and is setup and for me it'd be a shame to have to rely on a sysadmin for those task, I'm a system programmer after all. So being able to use Slackware for, at least servers in my jobs is my dream.

The fact is that even if we are "theoretically" right, the world is not right/fair/clever/filled with love... And now I start to think that maybe I should "learn" another distro for use in my day to day professional interventions. I hate that, but I paid a lot (should read, almost lost everything) to try to make the sheep and the wolf to cohabit. It hurts me but Slackware is not easy to "sell" to the "crowd", and even if once the box is setup and working for "months" without problem, you'll always get someone to reminds some 'loss of time' to the right person. It's a never ending war...

PAM is one of the issues I encountered, excuse me to have not enough time to do my DEVELOPER WORK (which is my main/real job) in a day, and then being a bit tired to have to read too much docs to install PAM and test it and so on... I couldn't setup LDAP in my jobs because of lacking time, whereas the feature was a "killing" one... Requested etc...

Sorry, it's long (that's one of the reason I didn't react earlier), but the quantity of Reaper's "dumb affirmations" plus the question "finally why do we use slackware ?", makes me write this... Maybe Slackware is mostly used by hobbyists and "few machines" cases because it can't do anything else "out of the box" if you can't invest huge amount of time as a SysAdmin... Yes If you're only a full time sys admin you can circumvent the problem and even maybe you're not challenged by anybody... But when you sysadmin ON TOP of other job, which is VERY COMMON in indie/startup situations, well... You simply can't while keeping sane...

So for me, PAM would help to lower the hostile attacks on Slackware, and allow me to continue to use it for my professional job...

Right now I tend to think I'll switch to Debian(-based?) for my "clients". Because If I get killed, some other people would be able to take the suite... (Being the only one to have some "skills" is a bad situation too...)

(1)- the situation was (2011) a company linode WWW server: slackware full couldn't be install because of lack of space, so the Xorgs and KDE and everything "graphics" was not installed... BAM! some CMS requires a graphic library to display charts.... It was in some "X specific" package (while not at all X only...), and I had to find the one who was missing and it took me... say... half an hour to an hour... Nothing deadly for me, but too long for the "wolves" who were waiting for ANY failure to dismiss my decisions and work...


That was my... 2 cents...

Cheers

Garry.

PS/ Sorry for my clumsy English...

5 members found this post helpful.

Yeah, it's bad enough having to put up with attacks like that from other-distro users on these forums, it must be a lot worse if you have to put up with it at work from colleagues and management. Sounds like an awkward situation you're in at work. I've never worked in IT, so I can't say what I'd do under those circumstances.
I'll stay out of the serious PAM discussion, since I know nothing about it: pros & cons, whatever.
As for your English, it's OK. A lot better than my French, which is non-existent.

2 members found this post helpful.

This special kind of admin seems to breed in France. I see them everywhere, they're a plague. They're the main reason I ended up creating my own company with my own services on offer, my own clients, etc.

1 members found this post helpful.

That's the other deal breaker for Slackware. No easy way to install a minimal and consistent server. And while years ago a full install was sort of acceptable, latest releases grew up so bloated that a full install on a production server is a no go.

Cheers

Well, that is really not a problem. Just leave out KDE, KDEI, XAP and XFCE. On a LAN server, I eventually add wmaker and saned from XAP. This setup is actually functional on a Dell Poweredge 1300 (500 MHz P-III, 110 MB RAM, 3x9 GB HD software RAID5) from about 1999. Other distributions would simply choke on that thing.

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't see that as a big problem.
Thanks to tag files and slackpkg templates you can do a fairly minimal install (enough to run slackpkg) and then just add what you need to get the job done (even a full install if you so desire).
I call it "just enough slack"
Check out my signature for an example.

hmmm... we should make a repository full of templates.

2 members found this post helpful.

I know all this. My point is that it is not straightforward. And you need tracepkg or some other dependency tracking solution to ensure certain level of consistency of the installation.

The point is not can PAM/LDAP/AD/SERVER SETUP/WHATEVER be done with Slackware. Sure it can. The hard way.

Cheers

I think that is understandable: who wants the burden (or, better, actually got the spare time) of supporting several minimal (and different) server installations for the most different purposes?

but, if you know what you're doing (and so you're able to solve most problems by yourself), you can do it (and even replicate it).

1 members found this post helpful.

@ivandi,

My point is: it is way easier to take stuff out than to put stuff in

Sure, it takes a lot of work to get things to work the way you want them to.
But starting with a full install and cutting the fat off is less time consuming (nevermind the skill set required) than building packages and try to integrate them with the existing distro without breaking stuff.

1 members found this post helpful.

Yeah, I've been there. This thread simply reminded me about another life when I used to do system administration for living. Started trying to integrate all this stuff into Slackware and ended up creating my own distro. But this was long ago. Obviously nothing changed. And it was quite tempting to throw my two cents.

Cheers

Eat systemd.

Don't be cruel.
Although after this thread he made me look for the ignore list (for the first time since I registered in this forum) nobody should suffer systemd.