Hello there,

After about 20 hours of troubleshooting and research, I'm just about ready to give up on this.

I've been trying to setup Samba as an AD server (not PDC, just a domain server in AD). After numerous compilations, re-compilations, with kerberos, winbind, ads and pam support, following various tutorials on the internet - I've almost gotten there - but not really.

Essentially I want to be able to allow other (Windows XP/Vista) AD members access to the Samba server shared folders without having the accounts setup on Samba - so that Samba retrieves them from the PDC (SBS2003).

At one point, I had everything working fine - only that every 5-10 minutes the accounts seemed to dissapear from the samba box, wbinfo -u and wbinfo -m would start returning erros and I had to restart Samba - and everything would be fine ... for another 5-10 minutes.

I have finally stumbled over some bits of information which say that actually Slackware does not have or support pam and (according to these posts) it is damn nearly impossible (or very complicated, take your pick) to integrate pam into Slackware.

My questions are:

1. How accurate are these reports (in the light of latest version of Slackware and Samba?
2. I need AD integration with SBS2003 - do I have any other choice to use with Slackware - can I integrate Samba on Slackware into SBS 2003 AD without using pam? How and where to get such info, if so. I'm interested in 'on the fly' integration - without accounts being stored permanently in Samba - just retrieved automatically from PDC (Windows 2003).

Many thanks for any advice or pointers you might have. After 20 hours of research - I have stumbled over so many pieces of disparate information - I'm not even sure what applies to older versions or newer ones, and what is possible and what is not.

I run Slackware 12.1 and downloaded and compiled Samba 3.0.29 - but I'm happy to change Samba version if necessary. I'm afraid can't really change Slackware version as it runs on an Asterisk server which was a pain to setup - and really couldn't afford to take it apart again.

I love Slackware and been using it for few years now. If the Slackware people think that PAM is no good - that's fine by me - but do I have any other choice for AD integration with Samba then?

Many thanks for any contributions.

I just thought I would post a reply to my own post - as it might come in handy to others.

After some more research, I have now finally come to understand (correctly I hope) that PAM is not an automatic and inextricable part of Samba when ran in ADS mode. As far as my understanding goes, it seems to be a module/library used to manage passwords/users on Linux - and thus it get's involved with Samba when already in use on Linux. In other words, it doesn't have to be used with Samba, if the underlying Linux box doesn't already use it before installing Samba.

I have been able to compile Samba with the following options:

--with-ads --with-winbind --with-smbmount

and got ADS mode running successfuly on Slackware, without any PAM stuff.

I just found it confusing in the beginning - as most tutorials for installing Samba with ADS assume the Linux you are installing on already has PAM, so they include instructions on configuring PAM (and checking for libraries) and compiling Samba with PAM support as part of the Samba ADS config.

Maybe somebody should make it clear somewhere (maybe in one of the more 'official' Slackware or Samba FAQ's?) that it is possible to run Samba in ADS mode on Slackware without PAM.