Winbindd in Large Installations

[Goetz Rieger]

Hello all,

we are evaluating a server consolidation involving Samba/Winbindd. The
main goal is migrating a couple (~40) OS/2 fileservers to virtual
Linux-Servers on S/390 running Samba. As a central authentication
instance a W2K PDC in going to be used. The userbase is about ~950
accounts. 

We definitely don´t want to maintain a second user database. So I think
our best guess is winbindd, which I used in a small installation and
which I found pretty impressing. But here some questions are coming to
my mind:

- Does anybody use winbindd in a larger productive environment?

- Is there any way to get a consistent user/ID mapping with winbindd
(ja, I read the manual) over several Samba servers? Something like "tell
winbindd to fetch all user/groups on startup" or distribute a predefined
tdb-database?

- Has anybody experience with the management of the memoryleak mentioned
in the release notes?

- Losing the database with the user/ID mapping would be a disaster. Is
there any problem with backing up and re-using the (tdb?)-files?

And apart from winbindd:

- What is the status of quotas in 2.4.x? Any improvements in newer
kernels? 

Every hint and tip would be appreciated.

Best Regards,
Goetz Rieger