[Samba] Linux desktop setup with authentication against Samba AD DC

[Rowland Penny]

On Mon, 2 Dec 2024 10:29:22 +0100
Peter Milesson via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:

> >>
> >> Peter
> > So, it works with Gnome.
> > It appears that, provided all the required packages can be
> > installed, it will probably work on any distro, I cannot test them
> > all ;-)
> >
> > Rowland
> >
> >
> >
> Oh, c'mon Rowland (^_^)
> 
> I'm going to start duplicating from a master image. Let's see what 
> surprises I get from UEFI...
> 
> Peter

I looked into Rocky Linux a bit further and found a repo for hxtools
and set pam_mount up on Rocky and it works, just like on Debian.

To date, I have working examples on Debian Gnome, XCFE and MATE.
However the MATE version has problems with the panels, they keep
segfaulting but the user gets logged in and the home directory share is
mounted, so it looks like pam-mount is working. I have also have
working examples on LMDE6 with the Cinnamon desktop and on Rocky Linux
9 with the Gnome desktop.

It appears that you just need 3 things:

A Samba AD DC to create users on.

A Samba Unix domain member to share the users home directory from.

A Samba Unix domain member to act as the client, with pam_mount,
hxtools and cifs-utils installed and configured correctly.

The only real downside I can see is, because of the various different
configuration files that the different desktops use, it is very
probably limited to one desktop per domain.

Rowland