Likewise Software, formerly Centeris, a leader in delivering mixed network authentication solutions, today announced the release of Likewise Open, an open source community project that enables core Active Directory authentication for Linux systems by joining them to Active Directory domains. Likewise Open provides organizations that are struggling with homegrown and do-it-yourself solutions with a proven enterprise solution for authentication. Likewise Open is hosted at www.likewisesoftware.com/open and the source code is available today to enable Linux vendors to integrate open-sourced Linux authentication solutions into upcoming versions of their operating systems.
Gerald Carter, a senior Likewise Software developer, respected member of the open source community, and long-time member of the Samba core development team, will serve as the project director for Likewise Open.
"Likewise Open represents our commitment to providing solutions that foster true interoperability between Windows and Linux for enterprise organizations," Carter said. "Making Likewise Open available will help a number of organizations that have had difficulties with authentication across multiple platforms. We look forward to working with our technology partners and the open source community to continue to improve authentication and access management solutions for mixed network environments."
Key features of Likewise Open include:
- User authentication with a single user name and password on both Windows and Linux systems
- The ability to apply Active Directory security settings on individual Linux machines to enforce password complexity and aging
- Credential caching for offline logon in the event of temporary loss of connectivity to the Active Directory Domain Controller
- Single sign-on for SSH and PuTTY.
"Likewise Open will allow NIH (the National Institutes of Health) to reduce costs by joining our Linux systems to Active Directory," said Jeff Plum, senior engineer working for Dr. Ronald Levin, Chief MRIPS/LDRR at NIH. "By working with the open source community, Likewise Software has made it easy for Linux distributors to include Active Directory authentication as part of the operating system and easy for centers like ours to deploy the solution."
Consistent with Likewise Software's focus to provide solutions and support for the enterprise, Likewise Software also announced key distribution and technology partners that will support the Likewise Open project. These partners include Red Hat and Canonical, the sponsor of Ubuntu.
"We are excited about the Likewise Open project and the solutions that it will provide Canonical's enterprise customers and other major deployments of Ubuntu," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project. "Likewise Open allows us to provide end users of the Ubuntu operating system the ability to join their systems to Microsoft Active Directory for user authentication. We look forward to the debut of Likewise Open in the April release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long Term Support)."
"Likewise Open is an important development for our enterprise customers who wish to use open source software to enable users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to authenticate against Active Directory," said Karl Wirth, director, Security Business, at Red Hat. "We plan to ship Likewise Open together with Samba in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2."
To learn more about Likewise Open or to participate in the open source project, visit http://www.likewisesoftware.com/community.
About Likewise
Likewise® enterprise solutions improve management and interoperability of Windows, Linux, UNIX and Mac systems with easy-to-use software for administration and centralized cross-platform authentication.
Likewise Enterprise provides familiar Windows-based tools for system administrators to seamlessly integrate Linux, UNIX and Mac systems into Microsoft Active Directory. This enables companies running mixed networks to use existing Windows skills and resources, maximize the value of their Active Directory investment, strengthen the security of their network, and lower Linux server TCO.
Likewise Software is a Bellevue, WA-based software company funded by leading venture capital firms Ignition Partners, Intel Capital, and Trinity Ventures. Likewise has experienced management and engineering teams in place and is led by senior executives from leading technology companies such as Microsoft, F5 Networks, EMC and Mercury.
For more information, visit www.likewisesoftware.com.
