Samba Server on Centos ... or Ubuntu ... or Some Other Distro

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 16:04 -0700, Nathan England wrote:
> One of the most irittating things about RH is they include a wierd version
> of adduser which doesn't allow a $ in the name, so you have to manually
> add each machine account to the passwd file, instead of being able to let
> the windows machine join the domain the normal way. It's not a horrible
> situation, but is annoying. Personally, I like archlinux for my servers.
> Though I'm still using some RHEL4 machines, they are being phased out with
> Arch.
> 
> Nathan
> 
> > I have a friend who wants to move his co's (windows type) files from a
> > dated
> > Novel server to a Linux box using Samba.
> >
> > I can load Centos or UBUNTU in the box.  I like Debian based distros for
> > stability and was wondering if Centos (RH) has an advantage over a Debian
> > distro given the nature of this being a 100% server system.
> >
> > Also, what better distros might there be over UBUNTU (I have UBUNTU 5.1)?
> >
> > Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
----
Myself, I am rather partial to RHEL/CentOS because that is what I know
but in the end, I doubt it much matters.

What Nathan is talking about is rather unimportant because that is only
a block if you resort to manually stumbling into creating machine
accounts by hand which is extremely unsophisticated and probably the
worst way to accomplish that - if you are going to make machine accounts
(i.e. use samba as a PDC and join Windows Workstations to the domain),
then the way to do it is to use the samba tools to make them on the fly.

Personally, I only use LDAP so none of that is an issue but before I
used LDAP, I always used webmin to create user/samba accounts, since
webmin is capable of simultaneously creating the Linux(Posix) and Samba
accounts - eliminating one step and permitting easy access to add the
user to many groups.

I've been using Red Hat versions for at least 7 years and haven't used
the useradd/userdel/groupadd/groupdel tools for at least 6.

Craig