Understanding a few key concepts

TLDR: Scroll down and read the three questions at bottom. Hello everyone! This is my first post in this community. I have been a Microsoft Stack developer and Systems Administrator ever since I obtained my Windows NT 4.0 Server MCSE in 1999. I have experimented with Linux here and here to answer some non-professional curiosities. With Microsoft’s .NET CORE taking off as a viable solution to developing applications on a Linux stack, I’m using this as an opportunity to upgrade my knowledge as much as possible. It’s been a decade since I have installed Linux on bare metal on anything larger than a raspberry pi but I’m wanting to learn how a small to medium sized business could potentially support all of their business needs utilizing as much open-source software as possible, and as little public cloud as possible.

After quite a bit of research I’ve chosen Ubuntu as the distribution I am going to be working with, and I’m very excited that the most recent LTR is VERY recent!

I already have all kinds of beginner questions, many of which likely have answers already but I’m concerned about how old some of the discussions and posts that I’ve stumbled across are and so I’m asking these with the intention of getting some “up-to-date” advice.

I will limit my questions to three:

  1. What are some of the best resources that you would recommend to get as well-rounded of an introduction to managing real Linux networks for someone coming from a windows server active directory world. I am not afraid to spend a little bit of money for quality books or video content but I am looking for up-to-date advice.

  2. Are there any certifications that I could pursue that would help me to guide my studies? I am not interested in the value of the certification as much as I am the knowledge that will come from studying it.

  3. I am struggling to identify the best way to create a group of servers and desktops that share common logins, as provided by Active Directory and Domains in the Microsoft world. I have stumbled upon a few different directions to go but all of them have left me with questions so I thought I would throw this question out now.

Thank you everyone for your time. I’m excited to be a part of this community!

Matt Christenson

This post started out as a quick “bump”, but I require more characters. Any help here, guys? Going on 8 days without a single response has me a little disappointed. Maybe there is a different online discussion group that I could be directed to? Any insight would be very much appreciated! Thanks!

If you would be able to speak German I could post a project I’ve did in my studies :smile:
LDAP for the user administration and NFS for data storage and the information transport.
We then exported the a folder from the NFS server where we created a home directory for every user and then mounted the correct home dir in fstab of every pc :smile:

One short answer is that “it depends” on the type of business or industry. Some industries have rich open-source ecosystems, others do not. Web-based businesses running Ubuntu are a dime-a-dozen, but operating a petroleum pipeline using open-source software may be a different matter.

Another short answer is the bookkeeping and accounting roadblock. Regardless of the rest of your operation, there are simply no enterprise-capable open-source bookkeeping or accounting applications. And there are very good reasons why not. There are lots of great proprietary solutions, many of which run on Linux.

This kind of question pops up every few months in ubuntuforums.org, and it’s not really on-topic for this forum (this is a collaboration site, not a support or general discussion site)

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