[Samba] Join a host PC without having to reduce the characters (NetBIOS).

[Sketch]

On Fri, 23 Oct 2015, José Augusto Carvalho Filho wrote:

> Hello everybody.I'm in trouble the following problem:
> Our netbios name can be at most 15 chars long, "AD-CLIENT-CENTOS" is 17 chars longInvalid configuration. Exiting ....Failed to join domain: The format of the specified computer name is invalid.
> How could join Join a host PC without having to reduce the characters (NetBIOS).?

You don't have to rename your machine, you can set a shorter name in 
smb.conf:

[global]
netbios name = shortname

It's too bad samba doesn't auto-shorten hostnames like Windows does, 
though being able to name them yourself gives you more control on how the 
names get shortened.  One downside to this is that since Kerberos is DNS 
based, if you use Kerbros credentials for authentication between machines, 
you will need to put a CNAME in DNS for the short hostname pointing to the 
real hostname.

I'm curious if NetBIOS names are actually required by AD, or are just 
there by default for compatibility with older versions of Windows.  If the 
later, it would be nice if it was possible to disable them completely in 
Samba.