Appliance mode

[Tim Potter]

Art Wildman writes:

> This will be great, but I'm not sure why I'd want to eliminate
> unix accounts entirely. Does this 'appliance mode' perform unix
> account auth, can I get a shell? Please keep in mind many of us

It's not eliminating unix accounts entirely, but rather
eliminating the need to create unix accounts for every NT user
that can connect to the samba share by using an entry in
/etc/nsswitch.conf. 

> Johan Östensson wrote:
> > 
> > >From docs/textdocs/DOMAIN_MEMBER.txt in Samba 2.0.7 tarball, line 142-152:
> > 
> > "And finally, acting in the same manner as an NT server authenticating
> > to a PDC means that as part of the authentication reply, the Samba
> > server gets the user identification information such as the user SID,
> > the list of NT groups the user belongs to, etc. All this information
> > will allow Samba to be extended in the future into a mode the
> > developers currently call appliance mode. In this mode, no local Unix
> > users will be necessary, and Samba will generate Unix uids and gids
> > from the information passed back from the PDC when a user is
> > authenticated, making a Samba server truly plug and play in an NT
> > domain environment. Watch for this code soon."
> > 
> > Any status of this? (could be pretty useful sometimes, minor speaking)

The appliance stuff is working reasonably well.  It does require
a combination of various executables from HEAD and TNG though. 


Regards,

Tim.