On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 10:51 AM, Bryan Boone <bryan-boone@msn.com> wrote:

I have a small network of about 10 windows XP machines. I need to set these machines up so that my users can log into any of these machines.

For me the simplest solution to solve this would be a windows 2003 server domain controller. Unfortunately due to some corporate restrictions I cannot install a windows server.

I was told that a Radius server could accomplish the same thing for me. Is this true?

Bryan:

I'm not the ultimate FreeRADIUS authority, but I think you'll find RADIUS is a poor solution for this, if indeed a solution at all.

If you can't set up a Windows server to do this job, the best way to meet this need is to run Samba on a Linux machine. If you run it in domain control mode, it'll act very much like a Windows server for the purposes you're talking about.

Check out http://samba.org/ for details on Samba. And for what it's worth I would lean toward using CentOS as the core platform (of course opinions vary on this point). The book "Samba-3 by Example" gives an excellent guide to the setup if you need one. It's available online at http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-Guide/

Good luck!

E.