Samba and LDAP

[Mo McKinlay]

Hi there,

First off, great work with Samba - I've been using it for a few years now,
and I think it's absolutely fantastic :)

Now, onto the purpose of this mail..

I'm currently working on a project to integrate (to a degree) OpenLDAP,
OpenSSL, Kerberos, Exim and Samba in order to provide a free alternative
to Microsoft's Active Directory. While on the face of it, this may appear
to be a massive project, it's not nearly as tricky as one would think
(thank goodness!).

My question concerns Samba's user authentication.

While it's quite possible to have a script (or something equivalent) that
generates /etc/smbusers, /etc/smbpasswd, and so forth, from an LDAP
database, I was wondering if there were any patches that you guys know of
that allow the Samba server to interface directly with the LDAP server,
grabbing the appropriate information from the "account" object directly?

If not, I'll probably have to sit and write all this stuff myself, but if
something along those lines already exists, it'd make my life a helluva
lot easier :)

Thanks in advance for any help/pointers/etc.

Regards,

Mo.

-- 
Mo McKinlay             Chief Software Architect         inter/open Labs
mmckinlay (at) gnu.org                                http://www.gnu.org