Looking for a mentor/adviser

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2010-01-31 at 20:55 -0700, Sean Parsons wrote:
> Craig,
> 	You are the master, and I'm just an idiot with 20 years of Microsoft
> experience..... so you win, I'm totally wrong. 
> 
> I got nothing more to add, and no desire for this to continue to escalate.
> Thanks for your time, and best wishes for the future.
----
I suspect that what you actually did was to run dcpromo on your Windows
SBS server and set it to 'legacy domain controller' in order to have
your Samba server join the domain as a 'controller'. That of course,
immediately broke Exchange. Of course, this is just a guess. The only
reason you would need LDAP on Linux was if it was to be a domain
controller which the documentation clearly states that it cannot be a
domain controller on an AD domain.

I am not escalating anything nor am I all that invested in your setup
because I am only left to guess what you did. I am pretty confident that
you were groping and eager to try anything without understanding the
reasons and the ramifications.

I have seen many people who think that they understand Windows
networking but can't function beyond the wizards and GUI provided by
Microsoft, can not query LDAP from CLI, don't actually understand how
LDAP actually works, how to access it, how to extend it, etc.

I can appreciate the extreme difficulty of trying to configure LDAP when
you don't actually understand it because I learned it simultaneously
with Samba 3 right when Samba 3 was released and it made me pull my hair
out trying to learn them simultaneously and all the while I was thinking
that Samba 3 was pretty much like Samba 2 (it wasn't - it's just that
the commands looked the same). My advice... if you don't fully
understand Linux, learn that first. At the point you are comfortable
with Linux, learn Samba. At the point that you are fully comfortable
with Samba, learn LDAP (if you actually need it or want to use Samba as
a domain controller).

Recognize that until Samba 4 is actually usable (and it will still be
quite some time to reach that stage), you cannot use Samba as a domain
controller in any domain that uses 'Exchange Server' 2003 or newer
simply because Exchange Server 2003/2007 absolutely require current AD
structure. But you can have a separate domain and set up trusts between
your Samba domain and your AD.

Craig


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