Caution Stoopid Newbie

[McEldowney, Michael]

JSW,

You _can_ replace your NT boxes with Samba.  I've done it with great
success and little difficulty.  Your making the right choice when you
do.  Linux/Samba is more stable, more secure, and _MUCH_ cheaper than
NT.  

One other note, you really don't need additional authentication methods,
like NIS, unless you want to add additional Linux boxes and/or services
and have a central database for them.  I think you'll find, however,
that many utilities for authenticating against Samba have been written.
For instance, my Squid proxy authenticates against Samba with the help
of smb_auth.  Works perfectly.

And welcome to Opensource!  It's the best you can get.

Mike


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jet Set Willy [mailto:jsw at manic-miner.freeserve.co.uk]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 9:25 AM
> To: Mark Haney; samba-ntdom at samba.org
> Subject: Re: Caution Stoopid Newbie
> 
> 
> > What do you mean by 'log in' to the samba box?  Do you mean 
> authenticate
> to
> > it?  Or are you just trying to access the entire box itself 
> and not just
> the
> > shares?  If you are doing authentication, 2.0.6 won't cut it.
> 
> hmm I think I mean authentication - sorry for being so unsure of my
> terminology as well as unsure of what I am doing.
> 
> When I boot the win98 box - I have set
> up the networking to log in to a particular domain and I 
> was/am hoping that
> I can get samba / linux to manage this.  At the moment I have 
> an NT box
> that is set to be PDC for the domain and this handles the 
> login requests.
> My ultimate aim is to remove this NT box and replace it with 
> a suitably
> set up samba (From reading the docs and some of the replies here it is
> obvious that the version of samba I have will not quite do 
> this - I am just
> not sure how far off it is and whether or not it will make a 
> difference to
> me.)
> Also as I understand it samba can be set up so that when a 
> request to access
> a
> share is made samba can check the priveleges / rights against another
> machine ie I have two linux machines and one is set to use 
> the other for
> authentication. I guess what I am trying to say is that I am 
> aiming for
> one list of users on the network rather than a list of users / groups
> on each machine.
> 
> > YOu'll need
> > the 2.2.0-alpha3 code (the latest and greatest) in order to 
> make samba act
> > as a PDC.
> 
> I am not sure if I have the knowledge to do that just yet :-)
> The book I have bought does go thru it so I guess at some
> point I will be able to give it a go but at the moment I am
> still feeling smug that I managed to get the thing working at
> all while trying to ignore the little voice that is telling me I
> don't even know the scale of the amount I have yet to learn.....
> 
> 
> > 2.0.6 supports authenticating of almost ANY (win2k excluded 
> I believe)
> > version of windows as long as there is an NT Domain 
> controller available
> to
> > handle the auth request from the samba box.  Of course it 
> needs to be part
> > of an NT domain in order to do that, which is in the docs.  
> Without an NT
> > domain, it's just like any other peer-to-peer network in so 
> much as you
> have
> > to add each user to the samba box that needs access to it.  
> Unless you use
> > NIS or another central authenticating mechanism.  Let me 
> know if this
> helps
> > or not.
> 
> Ok I do have a NT Domain controller but would rather not ! I 
> do already have
> it all
> in the same domain so I guess it sounds like I need to have a 
> read of the
> NIS
> how-to ?
> 
> Finally Yes it has helped - thanks for replying so promptly. 
> To be honest I
> have only
> just started learning about linux / Open source etc and am 
> stunned by the
> quality
> and volume of stuff available - to a newbie it is quite 
> overwhelming. Until
> you find
> newsgroups / mailing lists you tend to feel miles out of your depth.
> 
> Thanks
> JSW.
> 
> 
> 
>