[Samba] looking for recommendations

[David Bear]

I'm very new to samba4 and the AD services that it provides so I am looking
for some advice related to using internal versus external services.

I have 3 use cases that I want to learn how to handle with samba.

The first is easy -- simple AD DC for a home network. I think the only
option I question is whether to use bind as a caching resolver or just go
simple and use samba internal. I'm tempted to setup up Bind because a
second and third use case involve setup of samba for a small small office.

There are 2 things I want to be able to accomplish with my home network.
First, I have a qnap nas that I want to join to the samba AD and use as a
simple file server. The second is that since all my home computers are
linux (I force my kids to use linux) I would like some simple way to get
auth tokens from the samba AD DC that would allow them to seamlessly
connect to the qnap nas. Any experiences with this combination would be
appreciated.

The second use case would be to setup up samba 4 AD DC in an existing
Windows AD DC as an additional DC. The goal would be to have the samba DC
replicate all the DC data from the windows server so we can eventually shut
down the windows server. Its old and we want to have a seamless
'replacement' for it. Are there any good war stories people have about
doing this? I did see
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba4/HOWTO/Join_a_domain_as_a_DC but was
wondering if it is 'complete' enough.

The final use case is to use a samba 4 AD DC as an upgrade and replacement
path for a Samba 3 PDC. I would love to no longer had the requirement that
samba put all machine and user accounts in /etc/passwd and I seem to
remember catching something like that in one of the posts to this list.. If
I can avoid setting up ldap and just using samba's internal ldap, I would
love keep things simple. But again -- we go back to the question, which
internal samba services should I just use because they 'just work' for 99%
of the cases.. In my case I have no need to replicate user accounts across
multiple linux machines -- hence, I don't think I need ldap... Any wisdom
on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.



-- 
David Bear
mobile: (602) 903-6476