SAMBA PDC

[Trent Shipley]

Craig White wrote:

> 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
>
>
>   
A little BingO shows that Microsoft changed the name to
"Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications Overview"  with Vista and Server
2003 (?).  It is  treated as a known package by 2008 (r2) and Win 7.