[Samba] Advice for W2K migration to samba

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2011-03-04 at 10:47 +0100, Marcello Romani wrote:
> Il 04/03/2011 05:43, Andrew Bartlett ha scritto:
> > On Thu, 2011-03-03 at 09:17 +0100, Marcello Romani wrote:
> >> Hallo,
> >>       I'm running a W2K AD network with about 20 clients (mostly Windows
> >> XP machines, some Ubuntu 10.04 clients). I also have a couple of samba
> >> servers (debian 5) which are joined to the domain.
> >> I need to upgrade from W2K to something which is not EOL.
> >> The AD server is also a print server for the domain.
> >> I only have about 20 user accounts, so recreating them from scratch
> >> would be not a big problem.
> >> Also, the user profiles are not stored on the server (no roaming profiles).
> >> I read samba4 is still in alpha stage (alpha14 is listed on the wiki),
> >> but in terms of functionality provided is would the best replacement for
> >> my AD server.
> >> I would be glad to hear from someone who has done the switch from W2K AD
> >> to samba3 or samba4. Also, any advice or success/failure stories in
> >> similar setups would be great.
> >> Thanks in advance.
> >
> > This (Windows 2000 ->  Samba4) certainly has been made to work, multiple
> > times.  Those successful migrations that I know of were via Windows 2003
> > due to an odd Kerberos interop issue between Samba4 and Windows 2000.
> >
> > Andrew Bartlett
> >
> 
> Andrew,
>      thanks for your response. Now that you mention it, I remember 
> having read something about the need to pass through 2K3 to land on 
> samba4. I'll investigate that detail (obviously I'd prefer to avoid 
> setting up a 2K3 server just to migrate...)
> Would you then recommend going to samba4 instead of the (apparently) 
> more stable samba3 (samba4 being alpha as of today ?).

It's a simple matter of what you want it to do.  You can't do printing
with Samba4, and the file server is best used for just the AD shares,
but on the plus side you get an AD server, and a smooth migration path
from AD (you can't migrate AD to Samba3 without rejoining machines, and
the loss of AD features). 

You can of course try the direct W2K migration - the issue that is know
won't be a silly, un-noticed bug, it will either work or not. 

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Cisco Inc.