[Samba] Samba domain name in short format

[Rowland Penny]

On Tue, 7 May 2024 16:37:29 +0000
"Sun, Zhongdong" <zhongdong.sun at yale.edu> wrote:

> Hi Rowland,
> 
> I don't mind in using any technology as long as it works. In Redhat 7
> and Samba 4.6, everything is simple and work well. But Redhat 7 is
> near end-of-life, and we have to move on. The next choice is Redhat
> 8, but we met with this strange problem. We also tried Ubuntu 22.04
> with Samba 4.16 which didn't work neither. If you think Rocky 9 and
> its Samba/winbind will work, I'd like to try it.
> 
> Let me provide some descriptions on the configuration here. This
> machine is a dedicated Samba server, which serves about 200-300
> users. However, neither the file systems nor the user accounts are in
> this Samba server. The file systems are in several other NFS servers,
> and user accounts are in another NIS server. However, user accounts
> are their netids (like zs24) which are authenticated again Yale
> central AD. This is the only reason why the Samba server must join
> AD, i.e. to authenticate user.

It sounds like you are sharing NFS shares via Samba, for various
reasons this is not a good idea.
Your other problem is that NIS, for all intents and purposes, is dead.

> 
> We managed to use sss to integrate user accounts with NIS and AD.
> With winbind, this doesn't work. Either it cannot find the user
> account, or the authentication always fail. If you think Rocky 9 with
> Samba/winbind can satisfy the requirements, I'll be happy to install
> Rocky 9 and all associated software in this server for test purposes.
> Let me know if you have any questions before I reimage the server.

I thought that you had been using redhat for some time, seemingly this
isn't the case.
Just what are you using NIS for ? It is a directory service in the same
vein as Active Directory, so you really do not need both.

From my viewpoint, I have to ask, what is it with universities ? do
they run uptodate IT departments, or they really history departments ?

Rowland