[Samba] Popular Samba Password Backend Survey

[John H Terpstra]

On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, Jeff Davies wrote:

> Hi,
> I have been reading this news group for quite a while and have never run
> accross any kind of discussion on "What is the best choice for the password
> backend of your samba server and why do you feel so strongly about that?"

I believe this is well addressed in the Samba-HOWTO-Collection.pdf, also
published by Prentice Hall (available from Amazon.Com) as "The Official
Samba-3 HOWTO & Reference Guide".

There is an entire chapter on this subject called, "Account Information
Databases".

In short, the best backend for Samba-3 for sites that do not need BDCs is
the "tdbsam" that is new to Samba-3. Large sites (those that need BDCs)
should use the LDAP bases "ldapsam".

There is a lot of noise on this list due to the large number here who
insist on using LDAP. There are many reasons for this choice, not the
least of which is that LDAP appears to be the closest alternative to
Microsoft Active Directory.

I have covered the details of deployment of tdbsam and LDAP based ldapsam
with detailed fully worked examples in my new book, "Samba-3 by Example".
This book is available from Amazon.Com and will start shipping March 26th.

Cheers,
John T.
-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org