Linux as an NT CLIENT

[Jonathan]

> From: Mayers, P J [mailto:p.mayers at ic.ac.uk]
> Sent: Monday, February 28, 2000 6:20 PM
 
> Do you mean at login: prompt time? In which case, if your 
> system supports pam, you can use pam_ntdom (hence Luke's rather sparse
reply).

I still have no clue what "pam_ntdom" is, or how I would "use" it.  It's not
documented in anything I've found on samba yet.  What is it?  Is it a
compile-time option?  Is it a keyword in recent versions of smb.conf that's
not documented?  What versions does it appear in?  How do I find it?

> But you need to be clear exactly what you mean, and how 
> you're making Linux an NT client. 

I suppose "join an NT domain as a client" is as obvious in it's implications
to an NT Administrator as "use pam_ntdom" is to a Linux programmer.

A member client of an NT domain relies on the PDC for all authentication -
any user with a domain account can log in to any member workstation, and can
access resources based on rights associated with that login.  I want my
Linux workstation to use the NT PDC to authenticate users, so any user with
a domain account can log in to the Linux box, preferably without me having
to first create an account on the Linux box first.


> smbmount will allow you to mount smb shares ...

So far, this works as long as I supply an NT username and password to the
command.

> but there's a program with Samba called smbsh...

And boy, you want to talk undocumented!  There's no clue how to use it, just
that you can.

I realize that Samba is a work in progress, but there are features that are
in the stable release that the average non-programmer can't use because
nothing says how to go about using them.  The documents mention them, and
say what you can do with them, but there's nothing about how to implement
them.  Even more, there's nothing about troubleshooting them, where to look
if one of the features isn't working.

The server side is being pretty well documented, but we need a little better
work on the client/workstation side.  If I want to put a Linux workstation
in a cube and make it work with the corporate NT network to show the suits
an alternative to the evil from Redmond, the client side of Samba has to
offer network resources that can be made reasonably transparent to an NT
user.
 
If I can get this information together, I want to document a HOWTO of
putting a Linux workstation on an NT domain as a client, step by step, with
troubleshooting.