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'Mr. Samba' Talks About Samba's Future
Jan Stafford writes "SearchEnterpriseLinux is running an article that gives the inside scoop from Samba guru John H. Terpstra on upcoming new features in Samba-3 and Samba-4, recent events in FUD-fighting and the benefits that businesses can realize by adopting open source early."
...just about Samba 3. Samba 4 info can be found here
It would be nice, wouldn't it?
Of course, you don't actually have to use multiple user bases now. The winbind component can do out-of-the-box Active Directory integration and even map users to linux users. So there's nothing to complain about there.
There are a few big problems with it, though:
1) You can't have a backup for if your WINS system is down; Samba will not deal with both the original and the backup (because it won't sync the winbind produced groups/usernames with the existing groups/usernames).
2) UIDs and GIDs are mapped by Samba on the fly...so if they're different the second time you try it, too bad. You'll just have to chown any files that have the wrong permissions.
I don't really think that Samba's the way to go with this anyway. A better "out of the box" type solution would be to a version of pam_ldap that has built-in support for registering the unix box with an active directory, which is really the only piece that is still a kludge (to do pam_ldap+nss_ldap+mit_krb5+sasl, you have to manually get the keytab right now).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
John will be speaking at SCALE 4x this year. SCALE 4x, the 2006 southern California Linux Expo will be held on Feb 11-12, 2006. It is a grass roots / community run linux and open-source conference based in Los Angeles. Their Call For Papers is still open.
I am by know means a Linux guru but I have installed and maintained roughly 15-20 Samba servers in the last 10 years for small and medium offices. There really is nothing to it once you have the basics of the smb.conf down and what each parameter does. Start with a basic public access share and work your way up from there. I did an installation with RH6.x back in 1999 that is still in use today even though no one has touched the server since I left over 4 years ago. I provided instructions on how to backup the data to a windows machine(s) before I left. I hope they are actually doing it.
Just a quick fyi. The winbindd cache is persistent, so it will always map the same way on subseqent lookups. The winbindd uid/gid cache can also be remoted onto an LDAP server, making the cache common between multiple instances of winbindd on different machines. So it's not as bad as you paint it and is used in some very large organisations as their main mapping mechanism between Windows and UNIX.
Jeremy.
It might be worth noting that by using idmap_rid as the idmap backend, you can get common uid/rid mappings on multiple samba servers without having to set up LDAP.
In a small AD implementation with a couple Linux boxes running samba, I find idmap_rid to be ideal. I run across folks with this level of need all the time.