[Samba] Old Samba 3.x server as a Samba 4 AD member.

[Sketch]

On Mon, 5 Oct 2015, Emmanuel Florac wrote:

> we plan on setting up a Samba 4.x based AD. We have a couple of ancient
> to old systems running samba 3.0.24 to 3.5.7 and 3.6.24. Is there any
> problem to integrate those old systems as member of a Samba 4-driven AD?

Theoretically, it should work.  I believe Samba 3.0 was the first version 
with AD domain support.  However, you may run into bugs and limitations in 
older version of samba.  I would try it and see how it works.

Worst case, you can always use sssd or nslcd to handle the authentication 
instead of winbind.  They don't even require you be joined to the domain, 
as they can use username/password or a pre-created kerberos key for access 
to LDAP.

To my knowledge, the only thing the "join" really does is creates the 
computer and kerberos keys in LDAP (and on the local system).  So if 
you're not using winbind, the only thing you really need the join for is 
dynamic kerberos key management, so that e.g. users can log in using 
kerberos credentials instead of passwords or pass kerberos credentials to 
other machines for file shares and such.