"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

The Answer Guy

By James T. Dennis,
Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

Linux/Samba as a Primary Domain Controller

From Prophet on 22 Sep 1998

I looked over your answer to another gentalmen's question about the PDC for linux. My question is very similar. Can you tell me how to configure samba to be the Primary Domain Controller. I am have two other clients on my network, NT server (stand alone), and a Win95 client. I want both of these machines to log in to Samba. But this is not possible untill I get a PDC established. I understand that NT can handle the job well, but that isn't any fun. If you could help I would appreciate it.

=Prophet=

I think you should have read my answer more carefully. I said that the Samba team is working on supporting NT domain controller services through Samba --- and I think I said that it would probably be avaailable before NT 5.x was released.

However, I hope I didn't imply that this is already available as production quality code. Last time I talked to Jeremy Allison (one of the core members of the Samba team) he said that they had some beta level code out there. I just noticed a note on Freshmeat (http://www.freshmeat.net) that Samba 2.0 alpha version #6 has just shipped. So that would be a good place to start looking.

The Samba home pages are at: http://samba.anu.edu.au/samba It's a good idea to remember that Samba is not a Linux specific project. Although many of the developers and users are running Linux, many others are running various BSD flavors and other forms of Unix.

Your question is probably a pretty common one. There is a Samba NT Domain FAQ at: http://samba.gorski.net/samba/ntdom_faq/samba_ntdom_faq.html

... and yours is the first question listed.

As with any Open Source (TM) project, if this isn't moving fast enough to meet your needs, consider contributing some time, programming skill or other real support to the effort.

Copyright © 1998, James T. Dennis
Published in Linux Gazette Issue 33 October 1998

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