[Samba] Corruption of winbind cache after converting NT4 to AD domain

[Michael Tokarev]

12.02.2022 01:05, Rowland Penny via samba пишет:
> On Sat, 2022-02-12 at 00:34 +0300, Michael Tokarev via samba wrote:
...
>> Now, the most "interesting" part, besides the obvious wrong behavour somewhere.
>>
>> For a long time, we had unix users with their own regular home directories,
>> shell access and lots of work in linux.  As far as I can see, in order to
>> use AD domain, we should convert linux users to AD, so that a user is EITHER
>> in linux OR in AD, but not both.  I found nothing conclusive about this,
> 
> The old way was to have a Unix user and a Samba user, this mapped
> Windows users to Unix users. Now, with AD, you only have one user and
> that user is stored in AD. Winbind maps the AD user to a Unix ID and
> hence makes the user a Unix user. This all means that if you have a
> user called 'fred' in AD and /etc/passwd , you should remove the local
> Unix user from /etc/passwd.

This is very important point, Rowland. And once I started to realize it,
I started wondering why it is not written in ALL BOLD in all HOWTOs and
wikis out there. Because when you live in NT4-domain world, the "AD world"
is VERY different in this respect, and you just don't understand it.
This is, in fact, the main reason why I asked for the wiki account -
to draw a summary of some sort, stating how and especially WHY things
should be done and how/why they're different between NT4 and AD.
Because everything tells about converting your users from NT4 to AD,
but this is just a very beginning, while it seems it is all what
should be done.

>>   it
>> is just my gut feeling, - there's no direct requirement like this in
>> the docs
> 
> This was explained in the Samba wiki, but someone has just removed it.

It should be in ALL BOLD. Really, I'm not joking. This concept is so
much foreign to anyone who's used to NT4 or unix.. I'm oldscool, but
even for many modern sysadmins this is something foreign too.
That's why, I think, a wiki about AD should start from its concepts
and some WHYs.  I think most misunderstanding is due to this.

Again, I have much experience in this area, I understand how it works
(whole picture), but for ones who has less knowledge it is even more
difficult, - the HOWTOs describes steps which should be done but does
not add any understanding...

>> I found so far.  But I see that people do it like this, not mixing uids and
>> usernames.  It is just my gut feeling maybe I'm wrong..
> 
> It is not so much that you are mixing uids and usernames, you seem to
> be possibly mixing users.

What do you mean "mixing users"? What I want to achieve is to have one
user with its home directory, files and processes, who can login to
linux environment using natural linux way (either desktop or ssh or
whatever), and to be able to access his home directory from windows,
using windows ways to authenticate, with the help of samba AD. Roughly
speaking, we have local linux users with their passwords and ssh keys,
and their windows passwords are stored within AD. The uid numbers are
the same, the names are the same.  And I don't understand that it is
bad and especially WHY it is bad. Besides bad (to my view: buggy)
behavor of winbind (it should either give meaningful error message
or should work, but not error out randomly with a very difficult to
debug issues).

It is not mixed users, - I view it is the same single user whos
windows-related attributes are stored in the AD. That's it.

You see - this is why it's so difficult to grok this concept even
when you have strong background.

>> So there are two parts of the question:
>>
>> First, how such setup should be done? We really used to linux auth
>> and linux
>> work, it's somewhat unnatural to rely on the AD when dealing with
>> local linux
>> accounts.  But at the same time, these account should have access
>> from windows
>> to their files.  And most important, _why_ this setup should be done?
> 
> You should only have users in AD and 'getent passwd username' should
> produce output, something like this:
> 
> rowland at devstation:~$ getent passwd rowland
> rowland:*:10000:10000:Rowland Penny:/home/rowland:/bin/bash
> 
> I can assure that 'rowland' isn't in /etc/passwd

The main question is why. And my inside is fighting with this idea too:
why should we move our lovely local users to some remote location and
make our main server dependant from some other machine(s) while it already
self-contained?  We do have local accounts on all linux servers (sharing
the same uids), - this may be difficult to administer (it's not with a
bit of getting used to), but it is 100% reliable.

>> And second, what to do with this cache corruption, how to prevent it?
> 
> Setup your system correctly.

Why it is "incorrect"?  I just don't understand the main concept, it seems...

>> smb.conf:
>> [global]
>>     server string = %h samba server %v
>>     netbios name = TSRV
>>     netbios aliases = LINUX FS
> 
> I do not recommend using 'netbios aliases' use a dns 'CNAME' instead.

Hm.
It's actually interesting.

I didn't plan to mention this but we faced an issue here too.

When I added a CNAME for a host, it didn't work, - neither from windows
nor from smbclient, when logging in the server returned "wrong password"
when connecting to //cname/foo -U foo, but worked fine when using
//mainname/foo -U foo.  And it didn't work until I added the above
netbios aliases line and re-joined this server to the domain
(net ads leave | join). Only after that clients were able to connect.
It took me lots of time to figure it out.  In the AD some AltName
attributes appeared after the rejoin (I don't remember exactly).

I didn't experiment with this further, because nothing works on my
side for over a week and I need to fix _that_ first :)

..in another email, you wrote:

 > If you have AD, there is no point in using Samba as a standalone
 > server, in fact, if you later decide to join the 'standalone server' to
 > the domain, that is where your troubles start.

This is exactly what we're doing actually: converting a standalone
server to a member of a domain.

And for now I had to revert it back to its original configuration with
NT4-style domain in parallel with the AD.  The two have the same set
of SIDs, users, and especially user passwords, for now, and everything
works. And my 10 or 20 attempts to join this server to the new and empty
domain has failed, so we're back with two servers in parallel :))

...
 > It all just works, you may need slightly different 'incatations' in the
 > conf files, but it all just works.

I know it works.. I just need to understand the basic concept :))

 > One of the benefits of this is that you can use SSH with kerberos, no
 > keys.

So far I found that not using ssh keys is bad... :) I can manage my key
pretty well on my own machine without depending on anything (eg my laptop
without network connection).  And I can login to many different machines
worldwide with my key - to machines which are not part of our domains -
without risking to expose ssh to brute-force attacks. And from what I
see about kerberos, their way to store tickets isn't that good as eg.
ssh-agent stores ssh keys.

And things becomes even more interesting when using security tokens.
But this is a different topic.

>> Thank you for the time! It turned out to be quite a bit longer than I
>> expected...
> 
> No problem, I await your further questions :-)

Ehh.. Actually I'm a bit too talkative sometimes ;)  But I think this
is some pieces of information which is not obvious for many and is
difficult to understand... I definitely want to make some summary out
of this.

Thank you!

/mjt