AD Bridge Installation Guide

AD Bridge connects Linux and Unix computers to Microsoft Active Directory so you can centrally manage all your computers and users from a single identity management system.

This guide describes how to install and manage AD Bridge. The target audience is system administrators who manage access to workstations, servers, and applications with Active Directory.

 

The guide assumes that you know how to administer computers, users, and Group Policy settings in Active Directory and that you know how to manage computers running Unix and Linux.

AD Bridge is installed on a Windows administrative workstation connected to a domain controller so you can set user identifiers and group identifiers in Active Directory Users and Computers. Once the UIDs and GIDs are set, the AD Bridge agent uses the identifiers to authenticate users and groups and to control access to computers and applications.

AD Bridge includes additional features:

• Applies policy settings to Unix computers from the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC), including policy settings to define desktop and application preferences for Linux computers.
• Generates a range of reports to help improve regulatory compliance. The result: lower operating costs, better security, enhanced compliance.
• Provides graphical tools to manage Linux and Unix information in Active Directory. However, it can be useful to access and modify the information programmatically. For this purpose, AD Bridge provides scripting objects that can be used by any programming language that supports the Microsoft Common Object Model, or COM. The scripting objects provide dual interfaces that can be used by languages that use COM early binding, such as C++ and C#, and by languages that use Idispatch, such as VBScript and Jscript.