join linux to a domain - can't be that hard !
 

hi

i have a SuSE 10 server running as a PDC for my home LAN using Samba 3. all my XP clients authenticate to the domain and have their 'My Documents' folders mapped to the appropriate /home directories on the PDC

so far, so good ............

what i want to do is the same with my linux boxes - i logon to the linux box as user/password and the box sends user/password to the PDC and authenticates. then /home on the linux box is mapped to /home/user on the PDC (ie: exactly the same functionality as on the XP machines)

i'll probably end up with either an Ubuntu flavour or PCLOS for the linux boxes (if that makes any difference)

i've googled and searched and there's lots of stuff on joining XP to Samba PDCs but not for linux clients

i'm thinking a logon script is in order here - but's that a bit beyond me at my present level of knowledge !

can anyone help me out here ?

neill :confused:

A logon script shouldn't be necessary. In Fedora, you can configure the logon process to authenticate against an LDAP server, which at its most basic level. Assuming you've configured your PDC as an LDAP server (which I would imagine you would have in order for your XP clients to authenticate against it) then it should be fairly straightforward to configure Linux to do so.

In Fedora, there's an applet to configure the various authentication options that are available, and one of them is LDAP, for which you specify the server name and maybe some other options and away you go. I'd imagine there'll be something similar in Ubuntu.

actually the PDC is not an LDAP server - i chose not to go down that route as i felt it too complex for my (domestic) needs !

the PDC is simply configured with the stanfard yast tools in SuSE, producing a smb.conf very similar to those suggested elsewhere on this site

neill

Well I've just had a look in my Gnome control panel applets, and in the "Authentication" applet, on the "Authentication" tab, I have an option "Enable SMB support", in which you specify the domain and the domain controllers.

You might also want to take a look at pam.conf and pam.d (both in the /etc directory) - PAM is the Pluggable Authentication Module used for authentication. It can consult a variety of authentication sources and on my system at least I have an SMB plugin for PAM.

HTH.

OK

i'll load up a test system with ubuntu or FC5 tomorrow and see how i get on

thanks

neill