1.2. Direct Integration

You need two components to connect a Linux system to Active Directory (AD). One component interacts with the central identity and authentication source, which is AD in this case. The other component detects available domains and configures the first component to work with the right identity source. There are different options that can be used to retrieve information and perform authentication against AD. Among them are:

The main reason to transition from Winbind to SSSD is that SSSD can be used for both direct and indirect integration and allows to switch from one integration approach to another without significant migration costs. The most convenient way to configure SSSD or Winbind in order to directly integrate a Linux system with AD is to use the realmd service. It allows callers to configure network authentication and domain membership in a standard way. The realmd service automatically discovers information about accessible domains and realms and does not require advanced configuration to join a domain or realm.

Direct integration is a simple way to introduce Linux systems to AD environment. However, as the share of Linux systems grows, the deployments usually see the need for a better centralized management of the identity-related policies such as host-based access control, sudo, or SELinux user mappings. At first, the configuration of these aspects of the Linux systems can be maintained in local configuration files. With a growing number of systems though, distribution and management of the configuration files is easier with a provisioning system such as Red Hat Satellite. This approach creates an overhead of changing the configuration files and then distributing them. When direct integration does not scale anymore, it is more beneficial to consider indirect integration described in the next section.