NT Domain and Samba as a PDC

[Todd Pfaff]

Paul,

I run a number of samba 2.0.2 PDCs on Solaris 2.5.x SPARC hosts.  While
samba-2.0.2 is not advertised as having PDC support it works fine for me.
In one site, I provide all of the following services from my samba-2.0.2
PDC to about 15 NT workstations and 100 users spread across three physical
subnets:

- WINS
- domain logins
- home directories
- roaming profiles
- synchronized NIS and SMB passwords
- lots of applications including:
  - SDRC I-DEAS
  - Hummingbird eXceed
  - StarNet X-Win32
  - Microsoft Visual C++
  - Microsoft Office
  - Wordperfect Suite 8
  - ssh
  - PC-Pine
  - Cygnus GNU development environment

This all works very well and is wonderfully stable.

I did, however, run into a problem when I tried to move to samba-2.0.3.
I have a hunch that this problem may be due to the extensive byte-ordering
fixes that were made between 2.0.2 and 2.0.3 because I've seen messages
from other people claiming that they are running 2.0.3 as a PDC on linux
(Intel hardware I assume).  I'll stick with 2.0.2 for now and hopefully
this problem will be fixed in 2.0.4.  I'm also considering moving to the
2.1.0-prealpha code, but this is more experimental and I wouldn't run this
in production yet.

If and when you decide to run a samba-2.0.x PDC, feel free to email me
directly if you have any configuration questions.


On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Paul L. Lussier wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm currently battling with my Corp. IS group over NT domain administration.
> I admin a mostly Unix environment with a lot of WinXX clients.  The
> authentication server is owned by "Corporate" (you know, that nameless, 
> faceless entity that always makes do stupid things because
> "That's the policy"  :) and I have no control over it.
> 
> What I'd like to do is slowly sneak away from them by implementing a Samba
> PDC and creating my own domain here.  My question is, is it easier to set
> up a real WinNT server to be the PDC and have accounts on it, and have
> Samba authenticate against that, or, would it be easier to begin creating
> Unix accounts for everyone and just have Samba authenticate against
> NIS.  Obviously my preference is the later :)
> 
> My concerns however, are password changing/aging, etc. and the use of user
> profiles.  I have John's book, but that was written around 1.9.18 and doesn't
> include the PDC stuff in 2.0.x.
> 
> I haven't downloaded the 2.0.x stuff yet.  Are the docs that come with it
> sufficient to get me where I need/want to go today :)  Or should I wait for
> the O'Reilly book due out rsn.
> 
> Any opinions, ideas, pointers to docs, etc. are quite welcome :)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Seeya,
> Paul
> ----
> plussier at baynetworks.com
> Broadband Technology Division - Bay Networks (now a Nortel Company, Eh? :)
> 
> 	If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
> 
> 

--
Todd Pfaff                         \  Email: pfaff at mcmaster.ca
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