[Samba] Domain renaming problem.

[Frank Fürst]

Grant Taylor <gtaylor at riverviewtech.net> schrieb:

> Hay guys, I'm looking for some advice here.  The company I work for is
> implementing Windows 2000 workstations in the future.  At the moment we
> have Samba 2.2.4 acting as an NT 4.0 PDC, with out a problem I might
> add.  But alas the rest of the people here in my company will not even
> think about running Linux.  So I'm going to have to move over to a
> Windows 2000 / XP DC.  My problem is that I am using the name
> "CityOfColumbia" as the domain name on the Linux box.  I need to run the
> name on the Windows box in the end.  Is it possible to put multiple NICs
> in the Linux box and bind one instance of Samba to eth0 as domain
> "CityOfColumbia", and bind another instance of Samba to eth1 as
> "TempDomain" while sharing the smbpasswd file and profiles directory? 

I think this should work, in principle. You would have a smb.conf
essentially consisting of

interfaces = 1.2.3.4 1.2.3.5
include = %L.conf

and two separate configuration files. If the current name of your PDC
for CityOfColumbia is MayorOfColumbia, the old one would be
MayorOfColumbia.conf, and you can give the virtual server for the
temporary domain any name you like, e.g. temppdc with its conf-File
temppdc.conf. The clients that have switched to the temporary domain
will call their PDC by the new name (temppdc), and therefore get the new
conf-file. 

> Thus I could gracefully migrate all my workstations off "CityOfColumbia"
> to "TempDomain" so I could in turn down samba "CityOfColumbia".  Freeing
> up the name "CityOfColumbia" so I can bring the Windows 2000 / XP on
> line with that name.  

Be aware of a second problem: Each samba (or NT) server generates a
unique ID to identify itself and the domain it serves. I fear a samba
server with two names would generate two of them. But even if not, if
you switch to a NT/XP-PDC, this one will have a different SID. The
problem is that the clients will recognize a user bill\OLDDOMAIN as
someone else than bill\NEWDOMAIN. It may work with server stored
profiles, but everything that is local gets messed up, or rather the
user logs on to his client just like yesterday, but the clients thinks
this is a person that never logged on.

Bye, Frank
-- 
Frank Fürst, physikalische Biochemie, Universität Potsdam, Germany
Tel.: +49-331-977-5244		Fax: +49-331-977-5062