[Matthieu Patou]

Hi Abhinav,

On 01/19/2013 01:18 AM, ABHINAV MISRA wrote:
> I am Abhinav,  an undergradute from India.
> i was going through the project idea list of GsoC 2012.
> i want to take project "Make samba 4 DC Group Policies (GPO) aware " as my
> GSoC 2013 project . I am not sure whether this project is completed or not .
> i know C, python and learning java currently and i am most willing to learn
> anything that is required for this project .
> Please guide me how can i go about this project so that i can bring
> fruitfull results .
As Andrew pointed this project is still valid, and I think I'll mentor 
this project if accepted.
Python and C should be sufficient for this project.

GPO editing tools (ie. gpmc.msc) allow to set policies that applicable 
to domain members or domain controllers, the target do not make a 
difference on how it's stored (it's always a file) but depending on the 
nature of the policy the format of the file can be a bit different.
The idea is to monitor sysvol for additions/update/delete on file that 
are related to domain controllers, parse the files and do the 
modification in the smb.conf or in the sam database according the 
content of the policy.

There is small research work to know which policies target domain 
controllers and so see where/how there are stored in samba's database.

There is several ways to implement the monitoring and the modification, 
I'm ok for simple solutions and I would value more applicants that 
propose me their version instead of waiting for my proposal.
It has to be noted that we expect samba to run on Linux but not only, 
freebsd seems to be used by a couple of users so having a solution that 
works for recent major *nix platforms would be a great plus.

Concerning directions, you need to compile samba (use Linux as 
platform), join a windows 7/8 to the domain, install gpmc tools (check 
the howto).
This is step 0, once complete we can discuss a bit more on the next steps.

You can seek help on this list and on IRC channels (#samba-technical on 
irc.freenode.org).

Matthieu