[Samba] Samba AD DC on FreeBSD

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Sat, 2023-05-20 at 17:09 +0200, Andrea Venturoli via samba wrote:
> On 5/20/23 15:33, Rowland Penny via samba wrote:
> 
> > You never mentioned Freebsd before, I take it all back, I do not know if 
> > it will work, Samba as a DC on Freebsd is just too flaky (from what I 
> > have observed) to trust.
> 
> I've got 10 FreeBSD DCs running without any problem.
> Perhaps you are talking about some advanced feature I don't use?
> 
> Auth works.
> Scripts do.
> I rarely used policies, but IIRC they worked too.
> 2 DCs in the same network work.
> 
> What problems are you referring to?

If the basics work, I wouldn't expect any major issues, particularly if
you keep the fileserver and DC roles distinct, as recommended. 

It it good to hear that things are working well for you on FreeBSD. 
The big challenge in this space is packaging, if you have the skills to
help with the FreeBSD port then helping out there would make a massive
difference. 

We have seen in the Debian space quite how much of a difference a
passionate and active maintainer can make, keeping Samba up to date in
the packaging area.  Both have a few, but not significant, platform-
specific patches in the packages, but nothing major as far as I could
see.

The big thing I would say on FreeBSD is that sadly we can't on our
Linux docker infrastructure test, or even cross-compile to, FreeBSD.

It would be incredibly awesome if some work could be done in this area.
Even small steps like adding Alpine Linux to our bootstrap system to
get a non glibc build would be a start, then adding a cross-compile to
FreeBSD after that.  Testing is harder. 


Andrew Bartlett
-- 
Andrew Bartlett (he/him)        https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Samba Team Member (since 2001)  https://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT    https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba