I suppose you don't need to know all the details, but what I am basically looking to do is as follows
Create a preseeded netinstall of Debian that, once the install process finishes, will already be joined to our existing Windows Server 2012 domain. I've found some documentation and have looked at both Chef and Puppet for part of this, and am getting the hang of Chef's way of doing things. Are there better config management systems or better ways of creating a preseeded installer? For that matter Is there an existing recipe where I just need to provide domain login details and Chef does all the rest? Haven't found one if that is the case.
For the AD side of things, I have tried a debconf with the right settings for LDAP, and on installing the LDAP tools, could get all the info I expected. I then looked to the Debian wiki (https://wiki.debian.org/AuthenticatingLinuxWithActiveDirectory) and followed the rest of it, but when it came time to log in, not only could I not log in with AD accounts, but I could also no longer log in with local accounts. From the wiki, I added the lines to the existing pam.d/* configs. Was that the Right Thingtm to do, or should I have commented out everything else in the pam.d files? Is there now a better way? I noticed it's against 2003, but that particular platform is, well... ancient.
Surely these are already solved problems, and my Google-fu is just weak. My time doing Windows admin has left my Linux admin chops somewhat toothless I'm afraid.
[link][18 comments]