LDAP or Active Directory?

[sadams@bigrocksports.com]

Currently, we have no corporate-wide password sync or main user lookup/directory utility. I mainly want this for Zimbra, our servers running on RHEL 5 or CentOS 5, and to authenticate users who log into Windows or Mac. Any suggestions on whether I should look into LDAP (flavor?) or AD? I am just getting started researching this and would appreciate any advice.

[LMStone]

Authenticating against AD and Zimbra's own LDAP we have found both work reliably.

If you have a solid AD implementation already, it would be easier on your end-users to avoid having to deal with yet another set of credentials, at the cost of a little bit more setup work for you.

Hope that helps,
Mark

[sadams@bigrocksports.com]

We don't have either AD or LDAP. I am looking for suggestions on which one to go with that would be the most cost effective, easiest to implement, and would work with with Zimbra.

[phoenix]

We don't have either AD or LDAP. I am looking for suggestions on which one to go with that would be the most cost effective, easiest to implement, and would work with with Zimbra.

They'll all work with ZImbra as AD is just an LDAP server underneath, use openLDAP - it's offers the best performance and most scalable solution.

[LMStone]

We don't have either AD or LDAP. I am looking for suggestions on which one to go with that would be the most cost effective, easiest to implement, and would work with with Zimbra.

This is a bigger question than you might be thinking, depending on things like how many users you have, whether you are doing any remote access authentication, file sharing, running vertical apps, etc.

I would strongly suggest that since you have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of starting from a clean slate that you carefully document all of the authentication use cases and get buy-in from management before even beginning to settle on one or more prospective solutions.

Sorry to be firm on this, but changing auth engines later will be incredibly disruptive, expensive and may result in you being asked to update your resume!

All the best,
Mark