[riya.aggarwal05]

Hi

Till now what ever I studied on Active Directory I came to know that the DNS is required for its installation. like example.com. Now,I just want to know is there any way I can install Active directory on my local systems? I have around 5 centos/redhat machines having no public DNS but each have individual IP address.

Since I am a newbie in this, please let me know if I am asking for irrelevant thing.

For active directory means:
1. Tie up some clients with a server so that when ever we logged in to any client it authenticate itself and whenever we changed password on 1 system for a particular user, it got changed for all other clients as well.

Please correct me, I want to learn more on this.

Regards,
Riya Aggarwal

[Ossian]

Yes, AD does require a DNS domain but it absolutely does NOT have to be a public domain, nor does it require a public IP address.

In fact many recommend using domain.local (or .corp or some other non-routable name) for the internal AD DNS name and domain.com for the public side of things.

I am not an expert on integrating Linux with AD, but for windows clients you would:
1) Install Windows Server
2) Set a static IP
3) Run DCPROMO and install AD and a local DNS server
4) (optionally) install DHCP and configure a scope
5) Create user accounts in AD
6) Join windows clients to the domain

Step 6 is the only thing that would really change for you

[riya.aggarwal05]

still its not clear to me. Can I install AD on my local systems having IP addresses only?

If yes what would be my first step and please let me know some good links where I can google it. Till now I didn't find any relevant thing.

[Ossian]

I feel sure some of the 11 million + hits on for Active Directory Setup Tutorial will help:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=act...PJHO8gO1-JSbBw

You could also look at some of the TrainSignal courses or maybe a book

[Dumber]

AD is nothing more then an LDAP implementation. Most LDAP implementations requires a local DNS environment which can be on Windows or Linux using Bind.
Anyhow, you need to install a local DNS server on one of your systems to support AD.

However, again you don't need a public DNS zone nor Public IP addresses.