[Samba] Authentication with Multi-OS Environment

[Shawn.Gray at t-systems.com]

Hello All,

 

I'm coming back to working with Samba after not having touched for 5
years or so. Samba itself has grown quite a bit from the looks of
things, and I've definitely forgotten a lot of things in the meantime,
so this re-introduction is bound to be interesting.

 

I'm being asked to come up with an all-in-one fileserver solution which
will serve the following operating systems as client machines:

-          Windows

-          Linux

-          AIX

-          SGI

-          HP-UX

 

My first thought was Samba, but I'm wondering about how authentication
will work.

I'm pretty sure the Windows machines will be using Active Directory,
which I see that Samba now supports. Does anyone have experience with
using the other operating systems above as client machines?

 

-          What kind of authentication mechanism is normally used?

-          I understand that "net use" can be used with Windows clients
to mount Samba shares, so I'm assuming that no client software needs to
be installed or configured on Windows clients. What about the other
operating systems?

 

That's all I can think of for now.

Thanks in advance for any information.

 

Best Regards,
Shawn Gray