And exactly how scalable are user accounts (the ones stored in flat file called
/etc/passwd)? That will not scale well.
I think you know that's irrelevant for anything using PAM. Dovecot is equally capable.
It is relevant the very moment you place your users in /etc/passwd. PAM, or no PAM. Users in remote database with PAM to glue them to local accounts is another story. Cyrus can use both PAM and native libraries to access remote database. So simply choose the one you like more (PAM, or native). For Kerberos, you'll probably want SASL/GSSAPI, for LDAP/SQL/NIS it doesn't really matter.
You want to use Webmin or Postfix admin, and manage users in LDAP database? No problem. Just point Cyrus to your LDAP database, and it will be happy with it. Probably happier than Dovecot, and way more happier than wu-imapd.
Ah, now we are getting back to something actually relevant to fedora. It would be really nice if a packaged LDAP configuration worked out of the box and included the schemas needed for a posix account, a samba account, and the mail delivery stuff that sendmail and postfix can use for distributing mail with user@domain addressing across multiple machines, along with tools to manage the database. Does this exist somewhere? All the versions I've seen involve customizing the schemas and I've always been afraid that as soon as I did that a working but incompatible version would become part of the distribution.
AFAIK, Fedora comes with all standard schema files distributed with OpenLDAP. This includes posixAccount object class (part of nis.schema, and guess what, slapd.conf as shipped in Fedora RPM includes it at the very beggining). There's one additional schema file for autofs inthere too. Check /etc/openldap/schema directory for more. If you need to add some "nonstandard" schema, such as for example the one describing Kerberos principals, or the one used by Sendmail (/usr/share/sendmail-cf/sendmail.schema), simply drop it into that directory and include it from slapd.conf or include it directly from wherever it originally lives (if it is already part of an RPM, such as the one for Sendmail).
I don't have Samba installed anywhere handy to check it out, but I'd venture that its schema file is included in Samba RPM, or at least in Samba's doc RPM (simply copy it over to your LDAP server).
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
