FreeNAS, Active Directory, and Domain Controller

[Btrd2]

I have seen this asked before, however, it was in what seemed like much more "serious" setups, so different advice (may) have been given. I use FreeNAS as a learning project and a file server. I would prefer the file server to remain stable, at least not get so f'd that simply deleting a jail/stopping services/whatever won't fix.

So my question is, is it okay to have the DC be on the same box as a file server in a non-critical setup? Is there a guide/book/resource anyone can point me to in order to learn a bit more before I jump in?

This OS has been invaluable in learning btw, to have the "difficult" stuff taken care of with a UI and be able to tinker with jails has been, again, invaluable. Thank you so much for this OS.

 

[dlavigne]

Did you find the answer to your question?

 

[Btrd2]

Not really :) I'm still not sure what all the fuss is about - is it an inherently problematic decision, or is it just poor design for any "serious" operation?

I've seen a lot about it being a bad idea, but again, the use case was far more "serious."

 

[anodos]

There are rather mixed opinions on the matter. Samba team members say 'doing this will bite you in the butt later on'. I've also heard an IX dev say that it was fine.
From the perspective of learning how AD works, you'll want to virtualize your DCs for easy recover once you screw things up. If you run the DC as a VM on the FreeNAS server, you may run into a sort of race condition where the FreeNAS server really wants the DC to be online, but your DC is dependent on the FreeNAS server being online.

Perhaps a good compromise is to experiment with a Samba4 DC hosted on a raspberry pi. :)