[Samba] Renaming a computer on a Samba domain

[Gaiseric Vandal]

On 01/12/10 15:54, Walter Mautner wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 12. Januar 2010 20:24:25 schrieb Jason Somers:
>    
>> Clients are NFP, and have about 100 workstations. Once or twice a year,
>> they get grants for upwards of 10 new systems. These systems get
>> distributed to those with the most need, and in turn, their systems get
>> passed to whomever has computers less powerful than those.  System names
>> reflect different departments and subdepartments, so if you move a
>> computer anywhere, its name must change.
>>
>> Make sense?
>>
>>      
> Changing policy makes even more sense. Like here, our main office is getting
> crowded while one or the other branch office dies due to financial cuts.
> That makes for a lot of internal moves.
> While we had our client computers named that way as well, a while ago,
> we soon faced the nightmare (it's not only the samba/ldap, but other servers
> like the av management server, policy-driven services and whatever) of having
> to change a lot of data and database entries on every move.
> Now, we just number the boxen (try to change to numbers representing the SAP-
> generated 6-digit asset ids) and keep the location and similar info in a
> single database asset database.
>    


We use LDAP for a backend.   At some point when we switched from TDB to 
LDAP not all the machine info imported properly.   But I was able to use 
"smbpasswd -w" to dump out sambaSID's to copy and paste into LDAP.

So if your backend was ldap you could probably change the machine name 
in LDAP as well as on the machine.   Or possibly create a new LDAP entry 
and cut and paste the LDAP sambaSID.  This would probably be a huge pain 
with a TDB backend.

Once place I worked we used only dells, which had nice short service 
tags, which doubled as their machine names.