Hi stroller,
that was actually interesting, but it didn't help me much... I do not manage
the network, neither do I have any knowledge of it's working. I asked the
help desk guys to help out, but all they managed is to get me someone that
knew, after a 2 hours work, to mount the directories I needed manually. If I
were to ask them I will have to be sure I am quite knowing the area so I
could correctly describe to the Microsoft-trained network administrators
what I want. If you could point me to an article of any kind (or to the
relevant part in samba's huge documentation) I would be much grateful.
thanks.

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 2:42 PM, Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>wrote:

>
> On 7 Aug 2008, at 23:04, Andrey Falko wrote:
>
>> ...
>> As far as I know, don't take my word for it, in order to use Active
>> Directory on a GNU/Linux host, you need to setup LDAP and have it talk
>> to AD. Unfortunately I don't know how to do this, perhaps this will
>> help: http://www.linux.com/articles/40983 .
>>
>
> Hi there,
>
> I understood Active Directory to be Microsoft's implementation of LDAP +
> extensions. Or maybe it's a Microsoft's entirely own way of doing a
> directory service, with LDAP support bolted on afterwards. Anyway, yes,
> Linux hosts should indeed be able to talk LDAP to an AD server.
>
> On a domain that I manage we authenticate over Samba instead. I can't
> entirely recall why I chose this method instead of AD, but I'm pretty sure
> there were good reasons for it at the time. Once Samba is configured to to
> do winbind - it obviously needs to know the name of the domain server &c -
> one installs the PAM winbind module and references it in /etc/pam.d/ for any
> Linux services one wishes to authenticate off the Windows server. Samba
> then, presumably, acts as a client to the domain server and says "user X,
> hash(password Y) wants to log on, is this ok?"; PAM passes the response back
> to the service the user is trying to use.
>
> I think winbind alleviates some need to deal with Active Directory. I
> really know nothing about AD - all I have to do is log on to the Windows
> server (SBS 2003) and add a user to the domain in the Server Management For
> Idiots program Microsoft so kindly provides. The user is able to
> authenticate on the Linux box immediately after restarting Samba (and the
> restart is probably only required because I've fouled-up the caching
> configuration, or something). I also use pam_mkhomedir so that when the user
> logs on to IMAP for the first time ~ is automagically created; I had to
> reject Courier-IMAP in favour of Dovecot in order to be able to do this, as
> IIRC Courier doesn't use the PAM type "session", and that's required to make
> pam_mkhomedir work (Dovecot doesn't actually need to use this type, but adds
> an option to open a PAM session specifically to enable mkhomedir to be used.
> This is a requirement of pam_mkhomedir, NOT pam_winbind).
>
> What I have enjoyed about winbind is that it has (so far!) made adding
> additional services easy. I needed to run an ftp server (allow only
> 127.0.0.1) on the Linux machine, so that Squirrelmail's vacation plugin
> could upload the users' vacation messages to their homedirs. To get the ftp
> service (net-ftp/vsftpd) to authenticate off the same credentials was as
> easy as copying the PAM settings for the already-working IMAP server to
> /etc/pam.d/ftp (although I see that each is "sufficient" instead of
> "required" in this case). I was quite surprised it worked so easily, quickly
> and smoothly. Anyway, any user can sit at their Windows workstation,
> CTRL-ALT-DEL and change their password and the IMAP server will now respect
> their new credentials, which is the important thing (for me).
>
> Stroller.
>
>
>