[Samba] Samba + sssd deployment: success and failure

[Goetz, Patrick G]

On 6/12/19 11:10 AM, Rowland penny via samba wrote:
> 
> Why are you using sssd on a standalone server ?
> 
> your users will be in /etc/passwd and the Samba database, I don't think 
> sssd can talk to the Samba database.
> 

I'm pretty sure what happens when you set [server role = standalone] is 
that Samba then defers to /etc/nsswitch.conf for how authorization 
should happen, and since sss is listed there and is set up to query the 
AD domain, that's how users get authenticated.

In particular, it's not actually a standalone server but rather an AD 
domain member so that Security Group-authorized domain users can use 
their AD domain credentials for authentication on the machine.  There is 
an entire lab of linux workstations set up this way.  Users log in to a 
workstation using their AD credentials and their home directory (and 
various data/software directories) are automounted from the same 
fileserver we're trying to set Samba up on.  sssd also provides a 
caching service to assist with timely authorization.  As I mentioned 
previously, sssd bundles together the functionality of pam_ldap, nscd, 
and probably some other tools.  This was all working fine until we 
acquired the need to mount filesystems to a few Windows machines as well 
(due to some compute-intensive analysis software that runs only on Windows).

After doing some more reading about winbind (the 2007 Carter "Using 
Samba" book -- aside: why don't we have any updated Samba 
documentation?!  Will post separately about the state of the smb.conf 
man page), I have no a priori objections to using winbind instead of 
sssd.  In particular, I wasn't aware that winbind had a PAM hook 
allowing it to provide authentication for other services.  I do care 
about clean, modular system design, though:



     Other Services           | Autonomous     |
       Requiring     ------>  | Authentication | <-----  Samba smbd
     Authentication           | Service        |
                                   |
                                   |
                                   v
                      Can interface with LDAP/AD


It looks like the thing in the middle could be sssd or winbind; however 
most of our linux boxes which are AD domain members don't provide SMB 
file sharing services.  I only want to have to debug one 
AD-authentication service (that's headache enough, believe me), so would 
it make sense to run winbind on machines that are only using Samba for 
administrative local use (i.e. no need to install full-blown Samba)?

I looked at the winbind rid service, and am worried this will map SIDs. 
The other features I'm looking for:

  - We don't have and can't get the POSIX subsystem in our AD deployment,
    so I want the UID = SID; i.e not mapped in any way in order to
    facilitate subsequent aggregation (say of storage) of what are
    now independent labs.

  - Must support AD Security Groups because this is how we limit access 
to particular machines.

  - It would be nice to be able to use AD groups for authorization; then 
I wouldn't have to manage local groups in /etc/group (although ansible 
makes this less of a chore than it used to be).  Right now this doesn't 
seem to work with sssd; i.e. you can't chgrp files/folders to the AD 
groups listed using, say `id pgoetz` on the domain-bound linux machine.

  - It would be super awesome if nested groups were supported.  Right 
now sssd can't do this.