F&P Proof Of Concept

[Matthew Carpenter]

Thanks you for your response, Andrew.  I realize that my request was fairly
vague, as I haven't been "in deep" with Samba since about 2.0.5 and I know
that you guys are always doing great work.  I wanted to leave the questions
rather open in case I am missing some key knowledge to the best design.

The company is pretty bent on getting rid of eDirectory for some reason in
favor of AD.  But I'm fairly confident that good integration with either
directory would provide the necessary leverage for my group. 
Given the direction of AD, and desired goal of ease of administration, I'm
still interested in what path you or your team would take.  Again, it's not
that I'm being lazy here, I simply want to make sure they Samba get's the best
POC possible.  Ideally, we'd like to be able to plug in the Samba server and
only use GUI net-tools to administer it, including rights changes, home
directory creation, etc... I suppose we really want a NetWare-like solution,
but if Samba doesn't replace NetWare, CIFS on Windows most likely will.

We're not directly interested in the Samba DC role, since we will already have
an AD system running for this purpose prior to any rollouts (although I find
this attractive for other clients).  

It's perhaps a big question as well, but what differences would the
administrators see between administering a Win2k or 2k3 box and a LDAP/AD
Samba server?  I mean creating shares, changing rights (Samba or FS), etc...
I think I heard this in there, but is the need to manually add Unix users to
the system gone now?  That's an important item.

Thanks a lot!  I realize that I'm not being very specific, but knowing the
power and flexibility that Samba affords us, I'm not wanting to lock myself
into a mindset based on old knowledge.  Thanks!

Matt

On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 23:48:53 +0000
Andrew Bartlett <abartlet at samba.org> wrote:
<snip>
> > administration against LDAP, AD, or the combination of the two?  
> > What is the best direction you see for our solution to compete effectively
> > against AD/M$?
> 
> This is a very vauge question, which is why nobody has had the time to give
> you a decent answer.  Our LDAP intergartion is good - but could always be
> better.
> 
> There is research-stage work being done on becoming an active directory DC,
> but this is not something we can suggest you rely on for some time yet.
> 
> There is also some commerical research in this area, which looks very
> promising.
> 
> Our AD domain member support is getting pretty good - but it's not things
> like group policies, just how to authenticate a user.
> 
> eDirectory is an interesting game - eDirectory has a lot to gain from good 
> Samba intergartion, but I've not heard anything from them, and the best
> that we do at the moment is use them as an LDAP server, with no intergration
> into the single password change etc.
> 
> Andrew Bartlett


-- 
Matthew Carpenter 
matt at eisgr.com                          http://www.eisgr.com/

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