Re: Samba vs NFS

Greetings All,

I stand corrected, Samba 3 can join a Windows AD domain as a member 
server, but only with the AD in mixed mode.

See below for more details.
 
http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/samba-pdc.html#id2538831
http://www.enterpriseitplanet.com/networking/features/article.php/11315_2246911_2
http://www.phptr.com/articles/article.asp?p=169560&seqNum=3

That being said, I have seen and used Samba 3 to be able to serve as the 
authorization/authentication host for small Windows 2000/XP networks and 
it works very well.  Note I said "small" (10-50 machines) where the 
network is fairly straight-forward (engineering development for 
example).  My implementations may not have been the best either, as my 
understanding of exactly how AD works is not perfect.

This application may not be what the poster needs however, and I 
appreciate the correction.

RandyW

Michael Bartosh (local Account) wrote:

>
> On Feb 22, 2005, at 7:13 AM, Randy Williams wrote:
>
>> Since Samba 3.0 came out, Samba has been able to imitate a Full 
>> Windows 2000 Active Directory domain and is quite powerful.
>
>
> Nope, this is a focus of Samba 4 / TNG / Whatever.. Samba 3 can only 
> participate in an AD Domain, supporting kerberized authentication.
>
> As long as you're using Kerberos (assuming a strong enc typ; the 
> default iirc is ArcFour for AD, which should be fine) or even NTLMv2 
> (corresponding to an lm security setting of 5 on the AD side) you 
> should be relatively secure on the authentication front. Encrypted 
> transport is another matter.
>
> There's really no good, easily supportable way to do this without a 
> real VPN. Unless your users are relatively sophisticated ssh tunneling 
> is very cumbersome to support...no UDP support (oops NFS is mostly 
> out) unless you do ppp over the ssh tunnel which is an order of 
> magnitude more complicated..
>
> __
> Michael Bartosh
> Essential Mac OS X Server Administration
> O'Reilly, forthcoming
> http://www.pantherserver.org/buy
>
>
>