Trouble Joining Centos to NT4 Domain
 

Good afternoon,

If this is in the incorrect section, I apologize. Please feel free to move to a more appropriate forum.

I have very little experience with linux, but due to unique circumstances, have recently been appointed to Business Systems at my company. I have no formal training or education. The owner of the company, knowing I liked computer type stuff, decided to have me help him out after they had to let go our previous IT guy. I'd probably be able to figure this out on my own given enough time, but if some assistance could move things along more quickly, that would obviously be preferred.

Our network is set up as such, we have a RHEL system set up as our domain/login server for our windows workstations. Some digging around showed that it is NT4. I am now setting up a centos machine to run as our fax server and am needing to join it to the domain. I am connected to the network and am able to ping other systems. I can also bring up our documentation map that is based on the file server via browser using the local IP. I am having trouble however configuring the smb.conf file correctly to allow it to join (or at least I am assuming that is my problem). I have followed multiple variations of instructions found online accomplish joining the domain, but each time I am given the error that I cannot join as a standalone machine. I even got desperate and copied and pasted the entire smb.conf file from one of our existing linux machines that is on the domain but still to no avail.

I am happy to provide any information that might be needed to figure this out, however this is new territory for me so I might need with how to find it. (i.e. pretend I know NOTHING and tell me the exact command or location I need to run or look in to find the information needed)

I apologize in advance for being so ignorant and I appreciate any help I can get with this.

Hello and welcome to LQ. Sorry this has been waiting.

You may have support from RH on this by the way. There could be a few ways to configure the RH server. There are also a few versions of AD that can make a difference.
I'd start with your version of RH and see how they configured it. https://access.redhat.com/documentat...ldap-proc.html is an example for version 6.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/....12.linux.aspx

Moderator response
 

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <Centos> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Thank you for the reply. I apologize for the delayed response. We are very busy preparing for an upcoming ISO audit.

Just to be clear, I am aware that the problem is most likely something simple that I'm missing due to my inexperience. I will take a look at the provided links and give it another go starting from scratch. If I still can't manage, I'll be back!

Additional Info: (for anyone interested)

Our RHEL system (the domain server, not the workstation in question) is running 5.11 and our support license has expired. Since we plan on moving to the latest CentOS as soon as time permits, we have no plans on renewing it. Considering the fact that this is our production server and all of our workstations rely on it (not to mention the pending upgrade), making changes to the server configuration isn't something we would want to be dealing with right now. The domain server is running just fine. There are more than 35 windows workstations and 1 linux workstation already joined to it. I believe the only problem is that although I've been put in this position, I am way out of my realm of experience. More than likely there is something simple that due to my inexperience, I'm overlooking (e.g. I spent an hour trying to get the vnc server running only to find out that my problem was the fact that I didn't un-comment the user lines in the vncservers file (I didn't even know "#" indicated a comment). After spending half a day on this and seemingly having tried everything I could find, I decided to stop wasting my time until I could get some input.

I do appreciate the response, however our domain server is already set up as NT4 (which from some items I had read seemed to be similar but not quite the same as Active Domain?).

I'm really just learning all of this as I go. We could hire a real IT professional but that has backfired on us in the past. What happens is we get an outsider that:

1. has no dedication to the company (this is a family owned business started in the owners living room back in the 80s. We now fill orders for 9 of the Top 10 government and defense contractors.
2. when they leave, we are left scrambling to keep things running because it turns out corners were cut, procedures were not followed and nothing was documented.

This is the main reason for me being brought on board. Although its going to be a bit rough dealing with my learning curve, they know I'm not going anywhere. I've been with the company for 10 years now. I've held 6 different positions within the company basically helping out where ever is needed. The benefits of having someone who cares about the company and has knowledge of the entire network and how it all fits together is more valuable to them than a professional who doesn't really understand or even care about the big picture.