Anybody using a "real" Linux domain

This is not a request for a cookbook answer of "How do I ...?" I am just wanting insights from folks who may have done the following.

I buttist the full time techie at a fairly small school district, part time. They have 99% windows desktops, 5 Novell servers and a coupla of windows 200x servers.

Due to some disguntled vendors, the school board (all of whom are definitely NON-techie) has been convinced by the local legal staff (all one of them) that Microsoft is right in their claim that a windows license is only good for the machine that it was sold for. That is, if you throw the machine away, you also have to throw the license away.

To me that is total BS. If I buy a refrigerator for my house, then later move to another, can Sears say that I have to leave the box behind and purchase another one for my new house because the "license" for that icebox is only good for the place to which it was originally delivered? Not as long as Texas allows the ownership of shotguns, it doesn't. I have pointed out that we have a documented legal license for every PC that windows is installed on. However, board members don't put legal advice from a techie over that from a lawyer.

But, there is a good side to the above crap. Since we can either buy textbooks or new windows licenses, the textbooks won out and we have to find a cheaper way of doing business. Guess with what?

We have been gradually installing Linux in areas where a single function can be identifed and removing that function from whatever Winbox it was on. Such as our Proxy and Surf filter (That saves over nine thousand dollars a year), firewalls, SANs, programming labs, web server, etc. The process has been slow enough that we can take our time and make sure that the new solution works as good or better than the one it replaced. Desktops have to wait till be handle the servers. But everything that has gone before can almost be considered to be standalone applications.

Now it is time to plan for the next big leap. Replacing the Novell and MS server domain that covers the 5 campuses. No small thing, because Novell does a lot and it does it well and it does it without worms and viruses and 5 critical patches a week. I have been researching domains using SMB, LDAP, Kerberos, etc, etc, and obviously Linux will do the same thing - I am just not sure how well. In our Novell books and docs, domain management is the bulk of the text. For Linux, domains are mentioned in a couple of paragraphs at the end of a miscellaneous chapter. The few LDAP books I have found are too vague to help much and are unsatisfactory.

So, anybody out there driving a one-logon Linux domain, as opposed to just a bunch of servers? I would like to know your opinions along with what you are using.

Thanks Bill Davis