[Samba] Best strategy to move/upgrade Samba 3 PDC to new Samba 4 server

[Mark Nienberg]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 10:00 AM, MI <mi.lists at alma.ch> wrote:

> And of course, the important related question: Keep it an NT4 domain, or
> upgrade to AD?


It's a good question, and I am struggling with it too. My network is about
twice as large as yours, but still small by most standards. We have samba
3.6 sernet packages on a CentOS 5 server.

Clearly it would be pretty simple to update to a new CentOS 7 server using
the distro samba 4.1 packages. They don't support AD, but I'm not sure I
care. The frequency of samba updates in the 4 series would make for a lot
of work if building our own packages or compiling from source were
required, so I'm inclined to just stick with the distro packages.

Reading this list and the wiki and looking at the seemingly endless number
of options for smb.conf makes the upgrade to AD seem pretty intimidating,
and like you, I don't see any real benefit for our organization. One
concern though, is that future Windows workstations will pretty much expect
to be part of AD domains, so problems will begin to appear on NT domains.
Already I see hints of issues with Windows 10, but I don't have any
experience with that yet.

Another possibility might be to fire up a new Windows server to do the AD
work and join our samba file server to the domain. I don't know if that
would be simpler or not.

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