[Samba] What exactly IS the winbind daemon?

[Michael Gasch]

first: winbindd offers the ability to authenticate users and map sids to 
uid/gids

if you have a working ldap tree and serve (nss) your clients (members, 
dcs, clients) with ldap (uid, gid, sid) you don't need winbindd. all 
information is in the ldap tree and authentication is done bei smbd if 
you connect to a smb/cifs share (passdb backend).

if you want to login on the commandline with your dc-password you need 
winbindd (pam_winbind) or you can use unixPassword in ldap (pam_ldap). 
if you work with foreign domains and "non-domain" members you must use 
idmap...more can be found in the documentation.

hope that helps

greez

-- 
Michael Gasch
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Human Evolution
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
Germany

Phone: 49 (0)341 - 3550 137