SAMBA PDC

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 20:13 -0700, Trent Shipley wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 18:38 -0700, Trent Shipley wrote:
> >   
> >> This is for curiosity,  I'm not presently trying to implement Windows
> >> networking using a Linux box as the Primary Domain Controller.  How
> >> would a Linux PDC emulate Active Directory Services?  Do you still need
> >> a server grade Windows license running to provide ADS?
> >>     
> > ----
> > yes, or if you are really adventurous, you could build a very alpha
> > version of Samba 4 which is still too green for packaging yet for any
> > distro.
> >
> > Craig
> >
> >   
> I'm taking that as "yes" you can run a SAMBA server as a Windows PDC,
> but there's really no point because you still need Windows Server 2nnn
> to host the active directory.
> 
> I have 6 physical machines I would like to network.
> 
> * OS X Snow Leopard on late model iMac.
> * OS X Snow Leopard on newish Macbook.
> * Dual boot: OS X Snow Leopard/Vista on late model Macbook.
> * Ubuntu 9.10 desktop (favorite computer) on older Dell Inspiron.
> * Ubuntu 9.10 netbook (used as an e-reader) on HP.
> * Ubuntu 9.10 host/Win7 guest/XP guest on Lenovo desktop (possible new
> favorite computer).
> 
> What are some options? 
----
Active Directory is an enhanced networking schema that is hardly useful
for non-Windows systems since the primary benefits are kerberos to aid
SSO and Windows Group Policy Objects but the GPO and SSO really only
relates to Windows machines anyway. You can use Samba as a server and
provide CIFS (Microsoft's Common Internet File Sharing) services without
Active Directory.

Unless you have a slug of Windows systems to maintain or are running
Exchange Server (which requires AD since Win2K3 Server), there's hardly
any incentive to run AD.

That said, considering that most of your systems are Linux, I would
consider using NFS and installing the free SFU on the Windows system
(Services For Unix) which is available from Microsoft and it's free.

Craig


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