PAM configuration for Windows Active Directory

Task

If you want to configure OS4X to authentificate users with the configured username via a centralized Windows Active Directory service, you have to configure the PAM security system of the underlying Unix environment.

This documentation is based on the OS4Xvirtual VMware image, which is based on the latest Debian Linux distribution. If you have any other distribution, you may re-use these information in order to configure your environment accordingly.

Configuring the connectivity consists of several steps, which are described here:

Declarations

In this documentation, several values will be used for hostnames, domain name, usernames and password. These are only examples and must be changed according to your environment.

AD server:

Hostname: win2k8 (192.168.1.65, name resolving works via an another DNS server; FQDN: win2k8.sbs.c-works.net)
Domain name: w2k8.c-works.net

User for connecting to domain (with administrative rights, but without permission to login interactively on AD server):

Username: pamauth
Password: Test4321

User to be authentificated (as an example) and configured in OS4X:

Username: os4xuser
Password: Test1234

All commands on the Linux side are executed in the context of the user "root".

Synchronize time

The underlying security model relies on synchronized time between (Active Directory) server and (Linux OS4X) client). Windows Active Directory servers offer a NTP server which can be used for time synchronization.

ntpdate win2k8