Add AD authentication to CentOS in four easy steps

Many businesses use Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to manage their Windows server infrastructure. You can take advantage of AD’s directory services and maintain a single service to authenticate users on all platforms. The alternatives – setting up LDAP directory servers for user management on Linux servers, or worse still, using local accounts on every machine – would be a management nightmare, and would make meeting audit requirements a lot harder. Here’s how to integrate a vanilla CentOS 6.x host into AD for user management, and how to use AD-based credentials to manage a Linux server.