[plug] IT Overhaul

[Timothy White]

On 6/14/05, Craig Ringer <craig at postnewspapers.com.au> wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 22:47 +0800, Chris Watt wrote:
> > sorry to split this in two:
> >
> > Are there any docs I can read about setting up the user logging in
> > system?  either for Samba or for a Win Server.  As much as I'd rather
> > do this on linux, if it's going to be easier and more effective to use
> > a windows server then I'll work around that, it won't be on the
> > internet so perhaps I can pull a little stability from her.
> 
> It should probably be much of a muchness. Windows is almost certainly
> easier to get going, but may be harder to maintain. I find the NT4 at
> work painless, but then it does *nothing* but file serving and domain
> authentication, and most of the file services have been migrated to
> Samba now too.
> 
> The user "experience" will be the same for a Windows server and for
> Samba.
> 
> The documentation for Samba is pretty good, and I'd recommend that you
> start there. http://www.samba.org/ , see the left hand menu.
> Alternately, just install it and start from there.
> 
> If you're looking for something turnkey, folks like SuSE and (IIRC) our
> local friendly LinuxIT will be happy to sell you one.

As said by others. A Windows domain in Samba /is/ easy. Spend a little
time with 2 windows boxes and a Linux server, and samba doc's and
you'll have it running in no time. It's actually so simple that I just
migrated a whole domain to a new server by copying the samba config
files and other samba files in /var/ and it just worked. I took the
opportunity to change some settings as well when I migrated the home
directories.
Basically as I have users on both Linux and Windows boxes, I store
profiles for windows in ~/profile/, documents for everyone in
~/Documents/, which is mapped to My Documents with a login script and
used by the Linux computers as a store for 'My Documents'

If you need help. give us a buzz and I'll try and help you. Oh, and
there is a nice tool that allows you to manage the Samba users from a
Windows box if need be. If you have lots of users though, look into
LDAP for the authentication. Currently I have not got this running as
I only have about 6 users.

Tim