[Samba] samba and 59000 users in Active Directory

[m21 at altern.org]

Hi,

we've been trying to get samba and winbind to work on our campus. The whole campus is on Active Directory, that's about 59000 users. Only about 3500 of them are actually part of our group.

We have our own AD Primary Domain Controller with those 3500 users.

Our fileserver is running samba 3.0.0final and authenticates pretty well with our PDC. Even though uploading the profiles to it can sometimes take forever, we're not sure where the problem lies.

Lately we have been trying to switch to the campus wide AD.
Our testing server joined the domain and wbinfo -u would print out the whole list of users after a long wait (30 to 60 minutes).

Are winbind/samba fit for this amount of users? 59000
winbind keeps taking forever.
Also, We don't understand why sometimes users can authenticate and sometimes they can't. Shares are not available, etc.

Help or at least knowing someone managed to do samba fileserving for AD with similar amount of users would be nice.

thanks a lot, and keep up the good work.

Denis MJ