[Samba] Help: justification for Linux PDC vs Windows...

[Yan Seiner]

JJB
> Yan Seiner wrote:

>> Yup.  For small-ish networks, nt4 servers are 'good enough'.
>>
>> Last I checked, MS imposes an artificial limit on its servers, where a
>> server can only serve its own subnet.  Samba doesn't have this limit.
>> So
>> a single multi-homed samba server can do the work of several MS servers.
>>
>> So you don't need AD with samba as much since everything is on one
>> server
>> anyway whereas with MS you need multiple servers and all the management
>> overhead that entails.
>>
>> I could be wrong on this; it was true the last time I ripped out a bunch
>> of MS servers and replaced them with samba.  This was some time ago....
>> Anyone know if it's still a limitation?
>>
>>
>
> As I understand it, you need a WINS server for every subnet - we figured
> this out after the fact, so we now have 3 servers running Samba so that
> everyone can see all members of the workgroups (we are rolling out the
> domain slowly - in the meanwhile, we don't want to lose functionality.
> If anyone has a written proceedure for how to get this working with only
> one multi-homed server (does that mean one server with 1 network card
> for each subnet, or one card with 3 addresses somehow associated with
> it?) please post a link or email it to me.

It's been a while, so bear with me.

You assign multiple IP addresses to your ethernet card:

ifconfig eth0 192.168.128.1
ifconfig eth0:1 192.168.129.1
ifconfig eth0:2 192.168.130.1

and so on.  You can also do this through your distro's network configuration.

Then in smb.conf you tell samba to listen on those interfaces.

I think that's it.  You end up with one workgroup that different subnets
can see.

If you want different workgroups I think you can run multiple samba
daemons with different interfaces set up and different workgroup names. 
You'd probably have to separate out all of the volatile files like *tbd,
but I can't say.  As long as the IP addresses are different this should
not cause problems.

ISTR I had to do some voodoo with wins forwarding but that may be because
I had remote servers connected via VPN.

Not written down in any detail but perhaps others can fill in.

-- 
Windows is like a canary in a coal mine, it's the first thing to die on
your network.