[Samba] The 'not-always-on' infrastructure at home and Samba4 AD DC's..

[Rowland Penny]

On Mon, 26 Mar 2018 16:18:55 -0400 (EDT)
"Vincent S. Cojot via samba" <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:

> I built a small Samba AD DC infrastructure to serve UIDs and
> Passwords (4 VMs on 4 KVM hosts). My problem is that not all Samba
> DC's will always be turned on. Out of the 4 KVM hosts, 1 or 2 are
> going to be turned off quite often (especially in the summer),
> another one is going to be up half of the time on average while the
> first server will most likely average 95% uptime.

The problem here is that the AD data is replicated between DCs and if a
DC is turned off, the logs will start filling up with 'cannot find
DC?' type messages.
The laptops are the least of your worries, the passwords will remain
valid until they connect to a DC again.

I think you need to reconsider this, perhaps just use one DC on bare
metal, you will not get replication errors if there isn't another DC to
replicate to and you will be able to turn this off when required. You
will have to backup this DC regularly, just in case of a computer
failure, but these would have to be stored off the DC, perhaps on a
portable HD.
 
Rowland