ManagementB  

PowerADvantage adds a tab to the standard Properties screen of both AD User and Group objects, which allows access to all the PowerADvantage-specific attributes required to get the users authenticating on the Unix hosts. It can be managed from the Unix or the Windows side.

Our testing focused on managing from AD. Power-ADvantage uses the concept of contexts to manage Unix hosts with the same login configurations (username, primary group, home directory and shell). Contexts are mainly used to compartmentalize unique user and group attributes.

Once the contexts are created, admins can add users and groups from AD to the Unix hosts and use them to secure file system data as if they were local user accounts. PowerADvantage gives you the ability to map existing user/group IDs to AD accounts and import existing local Unix accounts to AD.

There are some rough spots, mainly around integrating smoothly with the Active Directory MMC console. For example, we found ourselves jumping back and forth between Symark's management console and t...

Unix GPO support is limited to managing various PowerADvantage settings on the hosts that will be authenticating against AD. A successful large-scale integration depends on other related components functioning properly (e.g., Kerberos auth will fail if KDC DNS entries are incorrect or if system time skew is too great), so it would be great to be able to centrally manage DNS and NTP settings on the Unix hosts.

PowerADvantage provides basic reporting that can keep the administrator informed on day-to-day activity.

Verdict

Symark does a great job streamlining a lot of underlying complexity and will get you rapidly standardized on AD. After our testing was completed, Symark was close to a new release that includes improved SSO for Kerberized applications and better GPO support.

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