[plug] IT Overhaul

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 22:41 +0800, Chris Watt wrote:
> Cheers for that,
> 
> Backup definitely.  No windows server is involved, currently the pc's
> just share folders in a horribly unstable setup.

Ooooh, yeah. That's how the macs at work were set up when I started
there. With MacOS 9, the *entire* *OS* locks up when it loses contact
with a network server it's trying to talk to, until the server either
resumes responding normally or sends a definitive failure (such as after
it's finished rebooting). Combine that with macs that crash three or
four times a day, and imagine the fun.

They now all talk to our NT4 PDC, and increasingly to the NetATalk based
Linux server that I'm slowly migrating things across to.

> With SMB, can I set it up so that it activates as soon as the user
> logs onto their local machine?  I don't want them to need to log in
> more than once.

If you use an NT domain, they must authenticate to log in. Users simply
cannot log in to their PCs without authenticating. After that, all
network access to resources (printers, file shares, etc) on the domain
is transparent.

>  Will I need aditional network authentication type
> things for this?

Yes, NT domain support set up in Samba. There's lots of info on the 'net
about it, and I understand it's pretty simple and works well these days.

You can have Samba authenticate users against LDAP or some other
database if you want, or just against the local user database.
Unfortunately, samba requires passwords to be stored differently to the
rest of the system (because Windows uses a different password crypt
system apparently) but this is the extent of the "special" setup
required.

-- 
Craig Ringer