Samba Domain Questions
 

I'm very familar with Samba and a little with domains, but when is a good time to use them? Is there ever a time that isn't so good to use them? The company I work for has about 60 employees. Does the size of the company play a role in whether to use domains or regular workgroups? Can somebody give me an example of when using domains is a good thing. Is it much harder to maintain?

Just curious. I've been working the boss for about 6 months to change the Novell servers over to Samba. His right hand man is a Microsoft zealot and I want to be prepared when he starts his rampage.

Thanks

The main reason for using a domain is that you have a single point of authentication. Depending on how you look at it this can be good or bad.

Good: One place to update password and user accounts
Bad: Single point of failuer for your network

If you introduce a domain that your network relies on for many of its service I would strongly advise adding a BDC as well as a PDC.

PDC=Primary Domain Controller
BDC=Backup Domain Controller

Well, as much as I hate to do it, I would have to suggest against using Samba as a PDC, and instead go with Windows 2003 (or at least Windows 2000).

I looked into replacing my Windows PDC with a Samba one recently, and the more I got into it, the more problem's I found.

On small domains (less than 10 machines and users) I would say go for it, but on a domain with 60 users like yours, Samba becomes to much of a headache. Adding machines and users is painful at best, plus all Windows XP clients have to have a registry patch applied, meaning you have to go to each machine manually and edit the registry. On a primarily XP client base like I have, this would have been an insane undertaking.

Now I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression, Samba is an amazing program, and I am in full support of it, and I was really hoping that my domain could be changed to a Samba one, but it just isn't feasible on larger networks.

And, not to offend any Samba hardcore here, but having administrated Windows PDCs for the last 5 years, I can tell you that Samba doesn't hold a candle to the flexibility and ability of a Windows PDC, especially Active Directory.

I'm sure that there are going to be people that are going to disagree with me, but I am telling you my honest personal experience in trying to convert to a Samba PDC.

If you do go with samba I would advise using an authentication method like ldap, that should solve a good few of the problems mentioned by MS3FGX.