Reintroduce netgroups support?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2022-06-03 at 09:53 -0700, Jeremy Allison via samba-technical
wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 03, 2022 at 12:00:16PM +0200, Samuel Cabrero via samba-
> technical wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I have received some complains after we dropped netgroups support
> > in
> > Samba 4.15.0. Our release notes only mention we dropped NIS but
> > netgroups went with it.
> > 
> > Some people still use netgroups without NIS, stored in LDAP and
> > made
> > available to the system through nss_sss, but it is also possible to
> > use
> > /etc/netgroups.
> > 
> > I had a look to the removed code and I think it is possible to
> > reintroduce netgroups support independently from NIS, using the
> > getdomainname() function from glibc instead of
> > yp_get_default_domain()
> > from libnsl.
> > 
> > Should we bring back netgroups support?
> 
> If you can do it to help a customer without an extra
> support burdon, then go for it !
> 
> I will help review the code.

I agree.  It is a hard line to find but I'm sorry we got too aggressive
pulling stuff that folks were using.

There is still a real use case for Samba that isn't all AD domains, no
matter how much I love them, and a set of administrators who have been
with us for decades now that have Samba working just how they want it.

We removed it because the supporting libraries were going away, but
looking over the code I see how netgroups could be quite handy, exactly
because they are not unix groups. 

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett (he/him)       https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Samba Team Member (since 2001) https://samba.org
Samba Team Lead, Catalyst IT   https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba

Samba Development and Support, Catalyst IT - Expert Open Source
Solutions