[Samba] Samba 4 distro and kernel choice

[Paul R. Ganci]

On 11/20/2013 06:33 AM, Joeri Feyen wrote:
> We want to setup a Samba4.
> What is the best distribution to start from CentOS 6.4 or Ubuntu
> 12.04LTS?
> I would choose CentOS because it is an enterprise OS. But the kernel of
> CentOS is a version 2.x and Ubuntu server 12.04 kernel is 3.x.
I have a Samba 4 AD running on a CentOS 6.5 server (recent upgrade from 
6.4). For anything Microsoft windows Samba 4 just works. I have not had 
to do much of anything except install the proper Microsoft tools on a 
Windows 7 client.

The issues I have had involve Linux clients. I have managed to get 
everything work (i.e. authentication, non-kerberosized nfs automounts of 
user home directories with proper GID/UID and ACLs) as long as I use 
winbindd on the Linux clients. User home directory automounts via cifs 
and kerberosized nfs do not work at all. SSSD on a Linux client works to 
authenticate and automount user home directories via non-kerberosized 
nfs. However other things broke when using SSSD (e.g. dovecot 
authentication fails, user web pages could not be found were two 
biggies). I even had issues in that the CentOS 6.4 OS I started with had 
a version of Samba that did not even come with samba-tool and as a 
result have resorted to using Sernet's Samba. The problem is that the 
software versions (e.g. CentOS 6.5 has sssd-1.9.2-129, 
cifs-utils-4.8.1-19, nfs-utils-1.2.3-39) used to perform many of these 
tasks are just too old and do not seem to play nice with recent Samba 4 
versions (I am running version 4.1.3-7).

I haven't had any issues with the kernel, but given some of the other 
issues I had with supporting software I would recommend using Ubuntu. 
Using Samba 4 is one case where using, relatively speaking, the cutting 
edge technology Samba 4 represents with the old stable server software 
found in Centos 6.4 or 6.5 does not work well.

-- 
Paul (ganci at nurdog.com)