[Samba] Three reasons for staying with Microsoft PDC's

[Tim Allen]

There appear to be significant hurdles to migrating from a Microsoft to
Samba PDC environment, something which I've been trying to do now for many
months. The difficulties arise in moving user's accounts over to Samba

1. Local profiles. It does not seem to be possible to move from an NT4 PDC
to a Samba PDC while retaining local profiles. NT4/W2k machines consider
logons to the Samba PDC to be new users, even when the Samba machine SID is
the same as the NT4 SID, and machine accounts have been ported over using
pwdump2.

OK, so let's try....

2. Roaming profiles. Although these work correctly with NT4 workstations,
there remains an unresolved "Access Denied" problem on logons with W2k
machines, whether or not "nt acl support = no" is present in the [profiles]
section of smb.conf. Various postings on the lists from people having this
problem but no solutions.

OK, bite the bullet and have every user start from a blank profile...

3. This results in various apps on the workstations choking because they now
can't find registry keys.

OK, re-install Windows on every workstation and all the apps. Alternatively
forget about any of this, just keep the NT4 PDC running and enjoy a quiet
life.


I've trawled the lists over the last few months trying to find answers to
this dilemma, as well as positing questions (back to last December)
specifically on 1, which for us is by far the simplest solution. No
responses, well not recently, and I don't know whether that's because

a. The answer's blindingly obvious to everyone else.
b. Nobody does this kind of thing.
c. Nobody has a solution.
d. It's impossible anyway.

Any advice on this greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Tim Allen