Post by @NaibofTabr@infosec.pub

2026-09-30 03:16 UTC

Sure, but they’ll have to catch up on almost 30 years of feature development (and feature creep). Active Directory is entrenched, by virtue of being the only game in town for decades. Not that they’re necessarily irreplaceable, but… a half-competent Windows Server admin can go from cold iron to running HyperV with a local domain (AD forest) with a SAN supporting 200 endpoints (assuming they’re already installed) pre-configured with end-user applications and all relevant network & security settings (via group policy), with a print server supporting local network printers, and be ready to enroll new users, in less than a day. I’ve seen it done, I’ve helped get it done. And all of that can be done with point-and-click GUIs, and not a dozen different ones, just like 3 (one for server/HyperV deployment, one for HyperV config post-install, and then basically everything else can be done through Active Directory). When you’re a sysadmin for a large organization, that kind of operarion at scale is non-negotiable. When I say that AD really has no competition, that’s what I mean. You could accomplish all of the same things on Linux, but it would take you a week of punching through terminal commands just to get the server and the domain up and running, and once you were done the user management still wouldn’t be as flexible or feature-complete as it is on AD (especially if you need things like auditing, or remote desktop support, or video conferencing that is linked to corporate email accounts).

Replies (2)

@brimlar@lemmy.world 2026-09-30 04:25

You should check out JumpCloud. It frankly feels a lot like you’re living in a cloud-first, Microsoft-free future. It’s a dream to use and scales, manages Windows, Mac and Linux as equal citizens. We don’t even maintain on-premises servers (including domain controllers) anymore, we just use IP addressing from the firewall and patch, control, manage all our computers from one pane of glass.

Open ##4949661
@chahn.chris@piefed.social 2026-09-30 12:22

Hey I didn’t say it would be easy, you’re right there’s a ton it’s doing. Rebuilding what it’s doing though wouldn’t take 30 years, they’ve figured out the requirements which means a startup can start fresh and build something even cleaner that works full on premise but seamlessly leverages cloud services if you want them for backup / recovery situations in the event that your on premise systems have a failure. I don’t know anyone working on this but the fact that it would be hard means it’s actually not easily replicable and would be a good business for a startup to capture. The value prop is high for companies, if they could save a huge amount of money on licensing and get improved operational cost without sacrificing what they get from on premise it would be worth it. It would definitely be hard to get companies to switch but the potential savings and country independence parts might be enough to make them interested in paying the switching costs.

Open ##4957747