Samba4: ID mapping is hard

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Sun, 2012-03-18 at 08:19 +0100, steve wrote:
> Hi
> There seems to be a discrepancy in the s4 schema concerning security groups.
> Domain Users comes with gidNumber: 100. This is however contrary to what 
> the schema allows. You can show this as follows:

Steve,

Domain Users does not hold that attribute.  There is an idmapping in
idmap.ldb for this value, but it is not placed in the directory by
default. 

As you mention here, you could add it if you want to:

> Create a new group. samba-tool group add mygroup.
> Use phpldapadmin to add the gidNumber attribute.
> 
> There is an error because gidNumber is provided by the posixGroup class 
> and that objectclass is not present by default.
> 
> No problem. We add objectClass: posixGroup and then we can add 
> gidNumber: xxx just fine.
> 
> This however throws up another error in that mygroup is now not a 
> security group but a posix group and the ability to view and manipulate 
> group members is not available in Active Directory Computers and Users 
> (ADCU). We made the folllowing observations:
> 
> 1. The members tabs are missing from mygroup properties in ADCU
> 2. you can still use samba-tool group addmembers to manipulate the groups
> 3. you can still select and change primary group for a user in ADCU
> 4. you can add users to the group under phpldapadmin but the users who 
> are already members are not displayed. An error is however correctly 
> displayed if you try to add a user who is already a member.
> 5. You can still manipulate the posixGroup as if it were a security 
> group, set acl's and permissions etc from the security tab of a file or 
> folder.
> 6. You can use a big hammer to add attributes that you should not be 
> able to add. e.g. you can add gidNumber without the objectClass (which 
> supplies gidNumber) being present using ldapmodify or ldbmodify.
> 7. posixAccount and its associated attributes work exactly as advertised 
> in the schema.
> 
> Conclusion:
> This is simply an inconvenience. Everything works as expected except 
> being able to view the members that are in a group either in ADCU or 
> phpldapadmin _after_ you have added objectClass: posixGroup to it.
> 
> Why does adding the posixGroup Class knock out the ability to be able to 
> view group membership? Is this an error in the posixGroup schema?  Is it 
> an aim that s4 be an _exact_ replacement for m$ AD?
> Is this the schema that is used?

We use the exact schema Microsoft uses, provided to us by Microsoft as
part of the WSPP documentation. 

> from: MS-AD_Schema_2K8_R2_Classes, under 
> /usr/local/samba/share/setup/ad-schema
> cn: PosixAccount
> ldapDisplayName: posixAccount
...

> There are full details of what we have tried with screenshots in the 
> latter part of this bugzilla:
> 
> https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8635
> 
> Please let us know if there is anything we can test.
> 
> Cheers,
> Steve
> (Could someone fwd to samba-tecnical?)

Why can't you raise this on samba-technical yourself?

If our behaviour differs from Microsoft's behaviour, then please raise
this as a bug.  I haven't seen any reference to a difference in
behaviour that we could address. 

Finally,

I know our idmapping situation in Samba4 sucks.  It really, really
sucks.  The reason it hasn't been addressed properly is two things:  id
mapping is hard, and doing it right is difficult.  Honouring uidNumber
and gidNumber attributes set in the directory seems reasonable, but we
cannot sensibly automatically assign those values, so what should we do
between creation of the user and the administrator choosing a uidNumber?

Using idmap_rid also seems quite reasonable, but to really be like AD we
should honour the trusted domain posixOffset parameter in doing that,
but we don't yet auto-allocate that posixOffset (handled on the RID
master).  

There is also the issue that for proper ACL compatibility, uidNumber and
gidNumber actually causes problems - groups (domain administrators in
particular) need to own files - but if they only have a gidNumber, how
would we do that?

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org