[Samba] Changes to the gecos field returned by winbind

William Marshall bmarsh at us.ibm.com
Thu Feb 5 20:41:23 GMT 2009


This is a trivial request -- and not a bug, but it could really make my 
life easier. I don't know if other Samba users would find this useful or 
not.

I'm using winbind to give "Windows" (samba domain) users access to Linux 
systems, and we need to audit, generate reports, etc. on who has access, 
etc. We're also using winbind groups in /etc/sudoers, so that gets audited 
too.

Right now, winbind creates an passwd entry like the following, using the 
fullname field from the domain controller.
getent passwd wrm3
wrm3:*:1868:1000:Marshall, Bill:/home/DOMAIN/wrm3:/bin/bash

It would be useful to me (as a corporate user/admin) if samba instead used 
the comment field to produce:
wrm3:*:1868:1000:123456,897,Bill Marshall:/home/DOMAIN/wrm3:/bin/bash
Where 123456 is a employee number, so that from Linux you can validate who 
an employee is, get their email address, etc. against another database.

Personally, I can easily do an LDAP search for the IDs, but we have other 
corporate tools that don't understand, nor want to understand how to find 
my LDAP server.

I know Samba doesn't need any more smb.conf options, but that would be one 
way for the "gecos" output to be selected by the admin.

Thanks!

Bill Marshall


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