Topic: Why SAMBA 3 on SME ?

[Arne]

I read with great interest that Samba 3 has been sucsessfully installed on the e-smith.

Now I just wonder - what is the main benefits or reasons to change to verion 3.0 ?

I can see in theese discussions that there is one argument, bether performace.

From the samba home page, I have found this:

"Samba 3.0 will support Active Directory and has many structural improvements that give us a much firmer base for the next 10 years of Samba."

I just wonder .. what is the real change in the real practical world ??

The existing or current Samba 2.x emulates an Windows NT domain controller. This mean that it is not possible to have more than one domain controller. Is it any real and practical changes here ?

What about the Win XP registry problem ? - Joining an XP client to a Samba 2.x server you will have to change some registry setting on each client as the XP with default config is not compliant with a NT domain controller (or emulated NT controller). Is it any change here ?

Is there other changes  that is worth to be mentioned ?

[PeterG]

I have been avoiding Active directory like the plague for some years now and I am quite happy about that.

From what I see most people do not need active directory unless they are a big company with multiple sites and servers for this that and the other. Even then the cost of retraining and hardware upgrades has meant that there are still large corporate who aren’t interested in it, hence why corporate PC's from people like Dell are still shipped with win2000.

If anybody has upgraded to active directory why did you do it, what was the advantage?

I think that the _very_ small registry tweak is a small price to pay for not having to learn about active directory just yet.

PeterG.

[Tom Haynes]

As close as I can tell the only reason that people in the real world have gone to Active Diirectory is that it is required by Exchange 2000 and 2003. Exchange/Outlook (and especially the calendaring) have kept a lot of folks running Wintel servers. Active Directory is a cost of doing business if you want/need the calendaring and PDA synch.

[Nick Ramsay]

The way I think of NT PDC/BDC vs. AD is more along the lines of the difference between the old Netware bindery model & Netware Directory Services.  It allows for a much more robust user directory, contextless logins, easier admin tools etc.

BICBW

[jcoleman]

Actually I came across a very real reason for using samba 3 last week.

We just installed a win2003 server for our administration application that uses msSQL (dont ask).

All our users authenticate off our sme server.

For that login to be trusted over to the win2003 server it requires active directory.

Samba3 did the trick.

elSpike out.

[adinobro]

There are alot of things that you can't do with group policies that you can do with Active Dirrectory.

For example Group Polocies will let you have a logon script but not a logoff script (need Active Dirrectory) also lots of XP settings can only be set using AD. To be honest you could probably find all the registry settings yourself and make the changes there but that's alot of work.

As for how it works NT put all the settings in a single file NTUSER.DAT where as Active Dirrectory puts it all in little files in dirrectories.

Why would you use it?
*Locking down computers. Hide C:\ etc.
*Global Settings. Got a new Proxy? Set it up and as users log in they'll get the new settings.

If SME has Samba 3.0 I'll probably move to it rather than doing it myself.