Replacing an NT Domain

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, 19 Nov 1997, Daniel Robbins wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> We are going to be using samba in our NT network as a file server.  Thanks
> to everyone who is involved with Samba -- it's really neat now that I have
> it working properly.  I especially like the ability to block requests based
> on IP#! :-)

> My question is whether you guys know of any way to get rid of our 
> NT PDC but still have the ability to log in as any user in the department from 
> any NT workstation.

i've been working on stand-alone PDC support for NT workstations for the 
last few weeks: longer than i can financially afford to.

answer, yes.  use the _experimental_ support in the 1.9.18alpha11 
version, which is disabled unless you compile with -DNTDOMAIN.


> Can samba reliably process NT login requests yet, or is 

i have no idea!

> there an alternate way of replicating account data between workstations (so that 
> we don't have to have a Microsoft PDC processing login requests)?

you could explore SCO's OpenServer, or AT & T's Advanced File / Print Sharer. 
these provide full NT Domain login support, being based on NT server.


>  Or is having
> an NT PDC devoted to processing login requests and storing profiles currently 
> the best solution?

you can tell the NT server to tell the client that the profile is actually on
a samba server (or on any other SMB server, for that matter).


[side-note: there are issues with file/date timestamps in samba which need to
be resolved (the timestamps aren't updated properly at the moment.  i *thin*
it's because samba doesn't do the SMB_NT_CREATE_AND_X call, so the NT client
does SMB_CREATE_X instead: that's the only difference i've been able to spot,
in the latest round of this particular saga...].


>  I would much rather manage user accounts using Samba and Linux

so would many other administrators.  won't be much longer, now.


> but I don't want to have to give up the convenience of having a domain.
> BTW, we have 70+ Machines running NT Workstation in our department. 

sounds like a good test environment, if a couple of those are spare...  you
want to help out at all? :-)


best regards,

luke


<a href="mailto:lkcl at switchboard.net"  > Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton  </a>
<a href="http://mailhost.cb1.com/~lkcl"> Samba Consultancy and Support </a>