SOLVED:




Please bear with me as I have very limited knowledge. I am doing my best but do not have any formal training or eduction. I am learning all of this as I go...

So the scenario is this, small business with a VERY old RHEL 5.1 system (NO SUPPORT).

This system is currently running our File Server, and supposedly also the Domain Controller. (as well as other things such as a Web Server for our Documentation and an SQL server).

We have about 50 windows workstations that connect to this system. They each have a home directory and additional drives (dependent on their usergroups) automatically mapped upon login.

We have finally got a brand new Hypervisor which I have begun to set up and have created a separate VM for each functionality.

Starting with the File Server, which I thought would be the easiest to set up and get migrated to. I got the Samba file server installed and running. Confirmed it works when connected to a workgroup, but when I proceeded with following instructions to join it to the Domain, I ran into some confusion.

One of the things I needed was the Kerberos realm, however upon opening the smb.conf on the original server, I saw that none was set. I then checked the krb5.conf and it was still set to example.com there. So how is this server even working as a DC?

In addition to the fact that I was told by the President of the company (who also set up most of the systems himself years and years ago) that this server acted as the domain controller, it is also evident by the fact that if the server is powered off, client computers cannot log into the domain.

I don't really know where to go from here. The President of the company, although fairly knowledgeable, is getting up there in age and does not really recall how he got this all working.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. As I said, I have pretty limited knowledge but I am trying my best to learn. I was not put in this position because I am an experienced and qualified systems admin, I was put in this position because he I he knew I was good computers, and more importantly, he knew he could trust me. Our previous systems admins have been very unreliable and left us in pretty bad shape, so it was more important to him to have someone who actually cared about the company and was willing to learn.

I would really love to get the new systems up and running as soon as possible, but obviously I am missing something here. Thank you in advance for any help/insight.

You probably have an NT4-style Domain Controller. Check smb.conf, it should tell you all you need to know.

Recent versions of Samba still support this type of pre Active Directory domain, but you should be able to migrate to AD pretty easily.

Here's the official Samba guide to performing a 'classicupgrade' (from an NT4-style domain to Active Directory).

Thank you,

As soon as you said NT4, I remembered that is what I had discovered last summer when I was trying to get a new fax server joined to the domain.

I'm not actually trying to do any kind of upgrade or migration. Our current users and groups are pretty sloppy and need to be cleaned up, everyone is going to need new passwords, and the mapped drives are also going to be changed so I was going to make a brand new domain server from scratch. In the meantime, we wanted to get the other new machines joined to the existing domain so we can start using them.

I have run into trouble doing such however. Performing returns the following error

I've googled this error to death and not had much luck. A few suggestions for things to check, but nothing that panned out. Made a few modifications to the smb.conf without any results.

At a loss of where to look next. Really wish they could be more specific than "Undetermined error"...