You can set up your systems so Linux users can gain secure authentication against a Windows NT Domain. That way they won't need a Linux account and a separate NT Domain account. It'll make life easier for you as a network administrator and make your power users happier.
Most recent Linux distributions use PAMs (Pluggable Authentication Modules), which are the key to flexible authentication. A PAM is an ASP designed to modularize the process of authenticating a user to a service. It was developed by Sun Microsystems and can be found on recent versions of Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX and Apple Mac OS X, though it is used most widely with the various free operating systems, including Linux (notably Red Hat, Debian and SuSE), FreeBSD and NetBSD.
The link for this article located at Network Computing is no longer available.
