Using Samba, Second Edition

Samba as a Domain Member Server

Up to now, we’ve focused on configuring and using Samba as the primary domain controller. If you already have a domain controller on your network, either a Windows NT/2000 Server system or a Samba PDC, you can add a Samba server to the domain as a domain member server. This involves setting up the Samba server to have a computer account with the primary domain controller, in a similar way that Windows NT/2000/XP clients can have computer accounts on a Samba PDC. When a client accesses shares on the Samba domain member server, Samba will pass off the authentication to the domain controller rather than performing the task on the local system. If the PDC is a Windows server, any number of Windows BDCs might exist that can handle the authentication instead of the PDC.

The first step is to add the Samba server to the domain by creating a computer account for it on the primary domain controller. You can do this using the smbpasswd command, as follows:

# smbpasswd -j DOMAIN -r PDCNAME -Uadmin_acct%password             

In this command, DOMAIN is replaced by the name of the domain the Samba host is joining, PDCNAME is replaced by the computer name of the primary domain controller, admin_acct is replaced by the username of an administrative account on the domain controller (either Administrator—or another user in the Administrators group—on Windows NT/2000, and root on Samba), and password is replaced with the password of that user. To give a more concrete example, on our ...