[REVIEW] launchd support for smbd and winbindd

[James Peach]

On Oct 15, 2007, at 4:04 PM, Gerald (Jerry) Carter wrote:

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> James,
>
>> In general, for an application to be a good launchd citizen it should
>>    1. launch on-demand, poking launchd to acquire any file  
>> descriptors
>>    2. pro-actively exit when it's idle
>>    3. not unlink named pipes that launchd is listening on
>>
>> winbindd does none of these. You can certainly configure launchd to
>> simply keep winbindd running, but in that case it would be a  
>> permanent
>> system service. For most cases on OS X, it is preferable to have
>> winbindd launched on demand.
>
> Could you define "most cases"?  maybe it's because I'm thinking
> in terms of domain integration and not file/print serving here,
> but I cannot think of when it is ever a good idea to run winbind
> for short periods.  Either it should always run or not.

On OS X, Active Directory domain integration is handled by the Active  
Directory plugin, which is part of the Directory Services architecture.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=DirectoryAccess/1.8/en/c7od44.html

winbindd is only used as an NTLM authentication proxy. Nowadays,  
winbindd also gets used to do SID mapping, but that's only because the  
smbd behaviour changed. It's not an essential part of the system.

--
James Peach | jpeach at samba.org