[Samba] Problem achieving manual synchronisation of idmap.ldb and the associated User and Group ID mappings between two Samba 4 AD DCs

[Rowland Penny]

On Tue, 26 Mar 2019 13:08:25 +0000
Stephen via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:

> Go on, I give in, what is wrong with the official Samba documentation?
> 
> Off the top of my head:
> 1) Your (ie Samba project) docs are structured a little poorly and 
> actually pretty hard to follow - eg a single article describes
> setting up Samba both with SAMBA_INTERNAL and BIND which is
> confusing. Two separate articles, one on each topic would be better!

The problem is that the Samba wiki is written from the perspective of
using a self-compiled version of Samba, not from the perspective of
this is how you use Samba on distro X.
Could you supply a link to the Samba dns page you refer to ?

> 
> 2) Despite being the official documentation its not free of errors,
> as I have just demonstrated. There were two missing essential steps
> in the tutorial to add a backup DC to a domain and this is a very
> fundamental Samba task. Its like the seconds step in setting up a
> basic Samba setup.

Whilst I cannot deny there are errors, I try to fix these errors asap,
but this relies on people give us feedback, something that we do not
really get.

> 
> 3) They lacks the clear straightforward step by step approach of 
> TechMint with screenshots and similar?

Not really a fan of screenshots, unless there is no other way of
displaying information.

> 
> 4) In practice this means that non-experts cannot / wont be able to
> use Samba, even for basic tasks as I am trying to do here. People
> less determined than me will give up,
> and I am basically dependent upon this (awesome, thanks everyone) 
> mailing list and its support.

Again, the wiki was written from the point of view of experts and not
necessarily understandable by 'non-experts'. This needs to be fixed,
but to do this, we need to know what is actually wrong.

> 
> 5) You need to get one person to write the docs. Another person
> should then separately *verify* the instructions that are given to
> avoid simple mistakes.

This not entirely true, one person could do this, make notes as they do
something and then do it again, just following their notes.

> 
> To be absolutely clear - I am trying to be constructive here and 
> genunely offer suggestions for improvement. The last thing I want to
> do is insult you and the other Samba devotees and your heroic efforts
> here on this list Rowland.
> At the same time quite a few of the the questions that are asked
> relate to pretty basic stuff that wouldn't arise were the official
> docs clearer IMHO.

I perfectly understand where you are coming from, I once described the
wiki as 'technically brilliant, but not very useful'.

One problem I see is, if the wiki is altered in the way that you sort
of suggest, which distro do you use ?

> 
> I know you are all volunteers, time is precious, but I think a little 
> bit more up front work on the docs would payoff in the long run and
> help reduce mailing list traffic significantly.
> 

Whilst I agree that altering the wiki will help, again it comes down to
how?

Rowland