Samba on AIX

[Elrond]

Hi Steven,

On Wed, Mar 08, 2000 at 02:18:13PM -0600, itsore08 at us.ibm.com wrote:
> 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 meant more, that IBM has interest in samba and is
investing some time, and maybe even fixing some issues (see
below).

> > 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. :)

Oh, that's also good.

> 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

Well, TNG works quite good (some issues are left... we work
on them), but it is definitely not production code, also
people use it in production environments (like me...)

So if you want to invest some time, that's fine. :)

> > > 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.

Precisely.

Unless I missed something and the 8 characters limit is
gone.

You might want to investigate this and maybe in the long
run, this limit will go away...


> Luckily, where I work all the NT workstations are numbered "UxxxXXX",

That would work then.

> though NT servers are "LANSRV01", etc. I guess I'll have to tell the NT
> team to rename their servers. :)

hehe. That's the other possibility. ;)


> Thanks again,
> Steven P.


    Elrond