Samba on AIX

[itsore08 at us.ibm.com]

Elrond,

> > I'm working for IBM's ITSO to produce a Redbook about running Samba on
AIX.
> > The book will be an installation, function, and sizing guide.
>
> Does that mean, IBM is going to support samba somehow? (I
> heard something about HP in that area?)

Not that I'm aware of.

> I have to say, that TNG is somehow the wrong branch for
> this attempt. TNG only is meant for PDC things, and not as
> a general purpose samba. There are lots of flaws in TNG
> related to normal file-serving. You should consider the
> HEAD branch unless you're targetting PDC-realted stuff.

We are just trying to be thorough. :)

I'd have liked to explore using AIX as a PDC, but as you say, TNG is still
very immature and AIX is perhaps not suitable. Oh well, back to 2.0.x

> > Do you know of any other issues concerning running Samba on AIX?
(Anyone?)
>
> Yes, as I already noted, having a PDC on AIX is a problem,
> cause you _realy_ need usernames in your passwd, that are
> longer than 8 chars. (you must put the names of your
> machines in the passwd, appended with a $, and when you
> like nice machine names, they tend to get longer then 7
> chars.)
>
> That's, why I haven't even tried to put my PDC on AIX.

Unfortunate, but still important for us to document this limitation of AIX.

So, if I understand this correctly, when configuring TNG as a PDC, you must
create UNIX user accounts for all users and their workstations (trust
accounts). The workstation trust account username must contain the
workstation name, appended with the '$' character. This restricts the
workstation name to 7 + $ = 8 characters because of AIX's username
limitation.

Luckily, where I work all the NT workstations are numbered "UxxxXXX",
though NT servers are "LANSRV01", etc. I guess I'll have to tell the NT
team to rename their servers. :)

Thanks again,
Steven P.