[Samba] Samba / AD integration

[Brian Foddy]

Eric Roseme wrote:

> Check out this paper:
>
> http://www.docs.hp.com/en/7212/ADSJoinMinimumPerms.pdf
>
> I wrote it about 3 years ago, so the Samba version was 3.0.7.  Things 
> may have changed.  It refers to HP-UX CIFS Server but at the time held 
> true for Opensource too.
>
> Eric Roseme
>
> Brian Foddy wrote:
>
>> I have a quick question on hooking Samba to a large AD domain.  
>> Following the excellent recipe at:
>>
>> http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_&_Active_Directory
>>
>> I see it states about half way down to join the machine to AD
>>
>> "Now to join your machine to the active directory. You will need the 
>> user-name and password to a Domain Administrator account to do this. 
>> The command you need to join the domain is net ads join -U sadwrn. 
>> This should then ask you for a password, and print a domain join 
>> notice."
>>
>> Is this required to use a Domain Administrator account, or can any 
>> normal user AD account be used?  I know AD doesn't allow anonymous 
>> browsing, but can a normal non-admin account be used?  As I read 
>> through it, I don't see any other special admin access required other 
>> the root on the Linux machine.
>>
>>
>> My goal is this...  We have a very large AD system, 80.000+ users, 
>> and we want to activate Samba on two servers for a very small user 
>> group (maybe 12 users) but validate userid/passwords against AD.  If 
>> Samba can be setup with little or no AD changes, or involvement from 
>> the AD administrators, but with some simple config from the UNIX 
>> admins, then we have a much better chance of getting this approved.  
>> But if it requires a lot of heavy involvement of the AD support 
>> group, ongoing maintenance, etc, then the odds are slim.  Largely 
>> political, the UNIX admins are much more open to open source 
>> solutions than the Windows side of the fence.  So if this can be sold 
>> as "just another AD client app" not requiring any special AD domain 
>> permissions, we have a chance.
>>
>> Thanks for any help/advice.
>> Brian
>>
>

Thanks for the good responses so far.  I was talking with a more "open 
minded" company AD administrator and he mentioned that a product called 
Centrify is in the currently "blessed" state and deployed to numerous 
high security PCI Unix servers in the company.  If Centify was installed 
on the RHEL Linux servers we hope to run Samba on, does this change the 
mix of steps or significantly alter prospects?

Brian