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.