[Samba] Re: Samba 3.0 and Active Directory Replication

[paul]

John Brown wrote:
> Your answers have helped quite a bit.  I understand a lot more now.
> 
> These compromises are small issues compared to the benefits of Samba.  We
> use Samba 2.x and we have benefitted from:
> 
> Less expensive software
> Lower hardware requirements
> Significantly fewer reboots
> Greater stability
> Faster performance
> 
> Many companies don't use group policy anyway.
> 
> One last thing.  We will be using OpenLDAP with Samba 3.0.  I have
> downloaded the code and have read through the documentation on samba.org.
> 
> How does the whole authentication thing work?   Do we still need the
> /etc/passwd and /etc/samba/smbpasswd files?  If so, are there any plans to
> have just one password database?
you may have read the docu but... anyway replacing /etc/passwd is 
achieved by a different NSS source (could be ldap, nis, whatever). If 
you gonna use LDAP as SAM backend you don't need /etc/samba/smbpasswd 
anymore. (you need nss_ldap and possibly pam_ldap from padl.com)

> 
> I have read of people using the User Manager for Domains and Server Manager
> tools from Microsoft.  Where can I get them and what version has been
> tested?
from microsoft?
> 
> What are the differences between the sambaAccount and posixAccount
> objectclasses.  Why is the posixAccount necessary?
see above, for every samba group/user/machine you need a corresponding 
entity on the unix side to map access rights (filesystem). Think of 
posixAccount as a template for a system user in your directory, 
sambaAccount extends this object to hold the samba specific attributes.
> 
> Regards.
> 
greetings
	paul