s4 managing posixAccount and posixGroup with samba-tool?

Bernd Markgraf bernd.markgraf at med.ovgu.de
Mon Nov 26 17:04:25 MST 2012


> Problem is, I don't know how to "manually assign posix UID/GID" numbers 
> using s4.  Using samba-tool there is no way (that I can find), using the 
> windows "Active Directory Users & Computers" console, there is no way 
> because apparently s4 doesn't implement "Identity Management for Unix" 
> and so the tabs for managing the UNIX properties don't show up there.
that seems not quite true. I just checked the AD Users & Computer
console on my windows box and the tabs are there and I can modify the
attributes. Honestly I don't know what I did to get this to work. I
never intentionally worked on that. I always intended this to be a
script job including creating of home dirs etc on the appropriate
servers.

> I'm left with some script (called s4user) tucked away in some bug report 
> around comment#50 by "steve" which uses ldbmodify with some horrible 
> looking shell scripting to get it working (no offense to "steve" 
> intended BTW, in fact thanks!).  And my question is: is this the 
> recommended approach or am I missing some useful tool that will let me 
> get a specific UID/GID mapping applied that will be shared to all 
> clients using winbind?
It's been an awful long time since I made this work on our site. So
things might have changed. steve's script is a variation of my scripts.
Difference being that I read a pseudo passwd file to get the missing
bits and create an ldif using a template and a simple sed.
Also my setup is so old, that it doesn't have a samba-tool yet.
Initially I create (windows) users with the old net command and add the
posix attributes after that. 
The script is in turn a variation/adaption of a script I used for years
on another site with a different LDAP server. Using ldifs to setup
attributes is certainly the most portable way. (Unlike steve I don't use
ldbmodify but rather use 'standard' (at least from a solaris point) ldap
tools to connect to the server and deliver the ldif.
After all attributes are set as needed I explicitly set the
UID-SID-mapping on all appropriate fileservers to ensure the mapping is
consistent across S4 and S3 servers.

> I'm thinking:
> 
> samba-tool posixaccount david --gecos "David Mansfield"  --loginShell 
> "/bin/bash" --uidNumber 123 --gidNumber 123 --homeDirectory
that looks certainly charming.

> Finally, if I were to write such an extension to samba-tool would this 
> be considered for inclusion BTW, or is the API of samba-tool restricted 
> to only some set of functions based on compatibility with some foreign 
> standard.
You sure would get my vote (if that counts ;-))

> Looks fairly simple (some code is already there in upgrade.py to a 
> certain extent).
Can't be too difficult. I'd guess if you replicate the behaviour of the
windows tools when adding posix attributes chances for inclusion should
be quite good.

 bernd



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