Re: SAMBA PDC and Openldap Howto

["Charles N. Owens" <owensc@enc.edu>]

Marian Steinbach wrote:

> After some web research I found this great tutorial about usage of LDAP
> (OpenLDAP) as Backend for SAMBA PDC data. This means that user and group data
> for authentication on several SAMBA servers can be stored on one ore more
> (replicating) LDAP servers.
>
> A great leap for Single-Sign-On...

Very true... and the URL is:   http://www.unav.es/cti/ldap-smb-howto.html

I have two pilot implementations of this BTW... I've been quite happy with the
results.  Once we've got some scripts finished for managing the LDAP database
we'll be rolling this out for our entire network (5 Citrix servers, ~250 Win9x
boxes, 100 Neoware Win-terminals).

Keeping all of our user data in one place (LDAP) and keeping our options open
(instead of opting for something like Active Directory) was too tempting to pass
up.

I chatted with Jeremy Allison (of the Samba project) at FreeBSDCon in October
about this and he said that the currently-experimental LDAP functionality was
soon (a few months) to be polished and brought, eventually, into the stable
production releases.  He predicted that the schema would change.  Just now I went
digging on the samba-ntdom mailing list and found this Jan 24th post by Samba
developer Luke Leighton:

     some kind person has volunteered to work on an NT5 compatible LDAP
     schema. that means that everyone currently using SAMBA-TNG's
     "development" schema is going to either be left behind or have to
     convert.

     i just wanted to warn you _now_ before code starts to get committed.

Once this process is complete my guess is that SambaPDC rollouts will be a big
source of new OpenLDAP users.

Charles


> Marian
>
> --
> Sent through Global Message Exchange - http://www.gmx.net

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Charles N. Owens                               Email: owensc@enc.edu
                                            http://www.enc.edu/~owensc
  Network & Systems Administrator
  Information Technology Services  "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's
  Eastern Nazarene College         best friend.  Inside of a dog it's
                                   too dark to read." - Groucho Marx
-------------------------------------------------------------------------