Samba with Active Directory: getting closer
Feb 11, 2010, 19:33 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Don Marti)
"From one point of view, Samba is open source high drama at its
finest: an early adopter of version 3 of the GNU General Public
License, and the recipient of an unprecedented release of formerly
proprietary Microsoft documentation, thanks to a high-profile
anti-trust case. Meanwhile, though, it's the low-profile software
that implements the Server Message Block (SMB) file-sharing
protocol, sometimes known as CIFS. Samba powers every inexpensive
NAS device in the computer store—without even a mention on
the box—and comes with all the common Linux distributions and
with Apple's Mac OS X Server. Today, as Samba comes closer to
implementing a key Microsoft directory protocol, the two aspects
are being forced together.
"Samba creator Andrew Tridgell, better known as Tridge, posted
to his blog, "There has been a lot of progress recently in the
development of the directory server capabilities of Samba4." In a
half-hour screencast video, he demonstrated a development version
of Samba acting as a Microsoft Active Directory domain controller
in a mixed environment. "We are making very rapid progress now," he
added.
"Active Directory (AD) is a central repository for all the
administrative information that a modern Microsoft Windows site
needs. Besides user names and passwords, AD functions as a DNS
server, stores network configuration policy such as firewall rules,
and acts as a back-end for applications' configuration. Microsoft
Exchange, for example, is completely dependent on it."
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