WAY OFF TOPIC, But I bet the answer is here...

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

it's not so off topic...

On Fri, 17 Apr 1998, Phil Cox wrote:

> All,
> 
> I am in a pinch. I need the answer to a couple of questions:
> 
> 1. If PDC fails, are there ANY tools which will promote a BDC automatically
> without ANY user intervention? What happens when/if the original PDC comes
> back on-line?
 
> 2. Using trust relationships, the PDC is the "point man" so to speak. If
> the PDC dies, CAN/WILL the BDC's maintain the trust relationships? Or does
> one of the BDC's need to promoted, then it will maintain the trust
> relationship?
> 
> The answers are time critical, so any info is appreciated.

ok.  i _did_ add some code about six months ago which deliberately made N
identically configured samba servers "fight" for the DOMAIN<1b> NetBIOS
name every five minutes.

what i did was got a group of samba servers to register DOMAIN<1b> - the
PDC name - with the WINS server.  if it didn't succeed, it didn't offer 

if anyone has two or three samba servers spare with automount home or
volume mirroring across multiple machines, then could they test this?

note that the only problem is the dependence on a single WINS server: that
now becomes the point of failure.

actually, just been thinking.

a domain is just a workgroup with an account database attached to it.  if
you replicate (manually and *securely*) you private/smbpasswd file across
all machines, and you have a common unix password database too (NIS?) then
all and any machines that provide this same account database are "Domain
Controllers" whether PDC or BDC.

i don't like the idea of separate PDCs and BDCs.  i _do_ like the idea of
having several redundant PDCs...

luke