[Samba] Why would nsswitch.conf be needed at all ?

[Gerald (Jerry) Carter]

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Frederic Olivie wrote:

| I'm not sure I agree. Samba is a unix process which needs
| to know about a username/uid mapping. As it gets this
| information internally via winbind, I just don't understand
| why it has to make sure the mapping is also recognized
| by the system.
|
| The only real use I see of the nsswitch.conf is to
| allow any other non samba software to get access to
| this mapping (/bin/ls as a simple example).
|
| So, why would samba ever need to control that the
| system is able to do this mapping when everything
| happens internally (sending a job to cups is certainly
| not a case in which a usernam/uid mapping is usefull.
| It would only be if one chooses to use lprm from
| a shell under one of the domain users) ?

The design philosophy makes the code path cleaner if you use
NSS.  This way you don't have one code path when winbindd
is present and one when it is not.  Granted it is not a clean
in practice as I make is sound but it is much cleaner.

And unless you are running on an appliance type box,
most people would prefer to see user and group names
when they run 'ls -l' so you end up needing NSS anyways.





cheers, jerry
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