Archive for April, 2010

Joining Ubuntu Lucid to Active Directory

Friday, April 16th, 2010

The latest Ubuntu release (Ludid, 10.4) makes it very easy for you to join an Active Directory domain. Here’s a quick guide to get you started.

1. Install the likewise open AD authentication application by issuing the command sudo apt-get install likewise-open

2. Register your Ubuntu system with the domain by running sudo domainjoin-cli join yourdomainname.com administrator (where yourdomainname.com is your domain name, and administrator is a user account on the domain with permissions to add computers to it).

3. When prompted, enter the password of your adminstrator account. A dialogue box will appear asking for your domain name,  enter your AD fully qualified domain name in upper case letters, i.e YOURDOMAIN.COM

4. Finally reboot.

Want sudo privileges? Go to your Active Directory and create a group. I called mine sudo, but you can use any group you like. A word of advice though, you’ll have less problems if you don’t use spaces in your group name.

Switch to a local user account with sudo privleges and at the terminal issue the command sudo visudo

At the end of the sudoers file add this line

%YOURDOMAIN.COM\\sudo ALL=(ALL) ALL

This tells Ubuntu to allow any user in the sudo group on your AD to use sudo privileges on the local machine.

To login to your Ubuntu system at the GUI use username@yourdomain

To login over SSH use yourdomain\username