[Samba] Authenticating to a MacOS X server

[James Peach]

On 12/12/06, Luke Sharkey <lukesharkey at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> Hello
>
> I am currently testing Fedora Core 6 i386 on a moderately sized network
> (with the permission of the system administrator), with 150 or so computers,
> some running Mac OSX and others running NT 4.0.
>
> As to the storage of personal files and authentication, there is both a NT
> 4.0 server (for the NT 4.0 machines to authenticate to) and a Mac OSX server
> (for the Mac OS X machines to authenticate to).
>
> Having *never really done all that much networking before*, I am having
> problems detecting the Apple Mac servers.   I am able to use konqueror  to
> access smb:/ and browse the Windows server quite easily (even though I have
> not yet set up smb.conf; why is this, by the way?), and authenticating to
> the NT4.0 server, using the Samba-howto and winbind, would not prove too
> difficult, I think.
>
> However, the NT 4.0 server is due to be replaced some time this year, and so
> I would like to be able to authenticate to the OSX server instead.
> Nonetheless, though documentation for authenticating to Windows servers on
> the internet is excellent (samba howto, etc.)  I can find very little about
> connecting to OSX networks.
>
> Can anyone tell me where I can find some documentation, etc., or give me a
> head start?  At the moment, as I've already said, I don't even know how to
> detect the OS X server (it may be password protected, by the way).

The OS X Server manuals are all online here:
        http://www.apple.com/support/manuals/macosxserver/

You probably should take a look at the Open Directory manual and the
User Management manual at least.

> Secondly, seeing as OS X is unix and is distantly related to Linux, (I know
> this is a strange question to ask on a Samba mailing list) but is there
> anyway I could authenticate to the Apple server without using Samba?

Yes. OS X Server supports lots of different authentication methods.
See mnuals above.

> I would like to be able to have the /home partitions on the server, and I know
> Samba has problems with this due to the sockets that KDE / etc. uses

Another good resource is the os-x-server mailing list:
    http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/macos-x-server

-- 
James Peach | jorgar at gmail.com