Several years ago, the Red Hat company introduced FreeIPA as a set of packages for Fedora. Why Fedora? It's because they wanted to give it a thorough test on Fedora before making it available for actual production networks. It's now available for RHEL 6 through RHEL 8 and all of their offspring, including CentOS. This is what IPA stands for:
- Identity
- Policy
- Audit
It's something of an answer to Microsoft's Active Directory, but it still isn't a complete one. It does some cool stuff, but it's still very much a work in progress. The coolest part about it is how simple it is to install and set up. All it really takes is to install the packages from the normal repositories, open the proper firewall ports, and then run a setup script. Then, you're all set to start adding users and computers to the new domain via FreeIPA's web interface. Here, I'm adding Cleopatra, my gray-and-white tabby kitty:
Although you can add Windows machines to a FreeIPA domain, it's not recommended. But, starting with RHEL/CentOS 7.1, you can use FreeIPA to create cross-domain trusts with an Active Directory domain.
That's pretty much it for the user management topic. Let's summarize, and then move on to the next chapter.