[Samba] Renaming a computer on a Samba domain

[Jason Somers]

I guess I am just missing the point here. I am not in the position to 
change policy. I must work with what I have inside of standard operating 
procedures.

Why is it such a big deal to change the computer name while connected to 
the domain? This seems like such a simple thing (that you can do on ALL 
Windows domains), and yet it does not seem like it can be done on Samba...

-Jason


Gaiseric Vandal wrote:
> 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.
>
>