NIS for Win95?

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, 6 Oct 1997, Elfredy V. Cadapan wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I recall someone on this list running an Internet cafe using samba
> servers...

me!  me!  (there's someone else, too.  check the digests.  he wanted a 
"kickoff" time).

> I need to do something similar. The setup I want:
> Several Win95 terminals with their logins authenticated off a Unix
> (preferably Linux) box. No NT servers as either clients or servers, just
> Win95 and a Linux or Solaris box.

linux is cheaper.  we use FreeBSD here.

> I've read the docs and DOMAIN.txt, and it seems Samba will never be a PDC,

<a href="http://mailhost.cb1.com/~lkcl/ntdomain.html">ha ha</a>

> unless Microsoft releases details on how NT does it.

ho ho ho not a hope.  and unnecessary, really
<a href="http://www.v-com.com/sourcer.html">Windows Sourcer v7</a>

> Which is fine... I
> want a program that gets logins and passwords from the unix box, and I
> don't care what protocol it uses (maybe NIS, Kerberos, or something else).

samba will do domain logins for w95, and has done so for about... 
eighteen months, so you won't need NIS or Kerberos on the w95 machines:
just use samba.  on your samba system, you user database can be NIS or 
Kerberos, but that's nothing to do with w95.

> Are there any freeware (preferably) clients out there that do this? 

i'd like to get people motivated to write one.  anyone interested in
helping out, financially?  you get a freely available SMB client, and you
get to help take control of CIFS development away from microsoft (they
currently own 95% of the clients, namely w95 and NT, and therefore totally
control CIFS development)

<a href="www.osr.com">OSR's FSDK which costs $85,000 with support</a>

> I've been looking at NISGINA, but from the webpage (haven't tried
> installing it yet) it looks like its only for NT boxes as clients. Is
> there a similar package for Win95? (possibly replacing one or more Win95
> DLLs...)

don't know.  NISGINA doesn't replace MSGINA: it calls crucial routines in 
MSGINA that are undocumented.

> I'm also interested in how other people handle such a setup. Ideally,
> someone shouldn't be able to walk in and login without a valid account on
> the Unix box.

or do what we have here, which is to issue a "guest" account, with the 
password posted on the wall.  normally, the machines are left logged in 
with the guest account.

extra facilities, such as being able to drag-drop your email or web pages 
from floppy (oh, joy), are left up to people wanting to do logins.

watch out for making things over-complicated, though: if your users can't 
do things without asking you questions, they'll go somewhere else.
 
> If there isn't anything like this, my only choice would be to install an
> NT server solely for authentication (as all my users are currently on
> Solaris, I hate the prospect of migrating everybody over to NT, or
> maintaining duplicate password lists)

yuk.

by the way, i apologise for being a late convert to (manual creation of) 
html.  since i downloaded lynx2.7, basically.



<a href="mailto:lkcl at switchboard.net"  > Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton </a>
<a href="http://mailhost.cb1.com/~lkcl"> Lynx2.7-friendly Home Page   </a>
<br><b>  "Apply the Laws of Nature to your environment before your
          environment applies the Laws of Nature to you"              </b>