I have a intranet that consists of seven Windows 2003 servers with one of them acting as the Active Directory Domain Controller. I've decided to try today's linux on one of the servers to see if I can eventually eliminate my dependency on Windows.
The distro is SuSE Linux Enterprise 9 and the box will mainly be used as a file-server with two 8xRaid-5 setups.
I need to know how to set up Samba to integrate with the existing 2003 Active Directory so that all the user account access rights that have already been set can be used on this Suse box.
I've done a little research on integrating with the windows server AD, but all the info I've run across didn't apply to Suse, or just totally lost me with instructions that assume you (me) already know more about linux that I do (i.e. leaving steps out an experience guru would just know). I'm a hardware professional, not a software engineer, so this is an excruciating painful experience that I hope will be worth it in the end.

Can anyone 'dumb it down' or point me to a place that pertains to Suse Ent and goes step by explicate step? What files need to be modified and how? Do I need to post the contents of any of them here? Please help.

Hi

Have you looked at the samba 3.x.x howto ? Its very informative, and also explains howto integrate samba with Active directory. The information in the howto is scattered around i bit though.

The first step is to make sure you can authenticate samba via Kerberos. for this you need to hve the kerberos (v. 5) klient installed and configured with the correct realm (see the samba howto). It should be a part of the distro (as with a windows server correct DNS info is crucial to make samba see the domain.)

when this is accomplished, you need to make samba a member of the AD domain. This can be done with the "net" command (look up the exact syntax in the howto).

third: You will need to install and configure winbind. This is also part of the samba suite, and is a piece of software that transparently maps the AD domain users and groups SID numbers to Unix uid and gid numbers. without this your users will not be able to authenticate to the samba server without you making accounts for everyone of them. Actually making these unix acounts to allow access to the unix systems is what winbind does on the run.

fourth: Make sure that "security = ADS" in smb.conf

good luck