[Samba] Comments / suggestions wanted - Winbind, 2K, and user Homes

[Andrew Bartlett]

Edward Yantis wrote:
> 
> I have a single AD domain with 4 domain controllers (win2k-not native mode).  I want all
> users to login to AD (clients from 98 to XP - no linux clients yet).
> 
> This is a school network with 4 campuses connected by wireless links (hence the 4 domain
> controllers) and I would like to put a samba server at each location for student home
> directories (basically a NAS setup to start with).  There will be no need to access win2k
> shares from linux machines.

Samba is run in many NAS boxes - doing your own should not be a problem
:-)/

> Can Samba/winbind create the user's home directories automatically with out creating a
> linux account on the samba server?  I have about 1400 accounts that I have to manage by
> myself and do not want to have to deal with accounts on multiple systems.
> 
> (assuming samba/winbind can create the home directories or they can be created via a
> script) Since all users are in the same AD domain, how can I ensure that only the home
> directories for a particular campus get created on the corresponding server?  I have the
> users separated in the AD with an OU for each campus.
> 
> Thanks for any comments or suggestions.

Should be possible with either Samba 2.2 or Samba HEAD (featuring LDAP
and kerberos based ADS support, as opposed to RPC and NTLM in 2.2).  

If you use pam_winbind to create the home directories, they will be
created on demand, and won't appear on the 'wrong' server unless sombody
logs into it.  

The extra accounts will appear, but that should not be an issue.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet at pcug.org.au
Manager, Authentication Subsystems, Samba Team  abartlet at samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet at hawkerc.net
http://samba.org     http://build.samba.org     http://hawkerc.net