> > Hey Buchan, thanks for this information. And with > appologies to the list this was the purpose of my > short message announcing the beta release. I know that > you are working on it and was hoping that you would be > awake and would answer. >
Ahh, but there are better ways of achieving this, either by direct mail (probably the best) or one of the samba lists (some of which I subscribe to, some of which I do in digest, some I don't ..) where it would be more on-topic. > I understand that even that alpha release has been > used in production so, for the improvements that samba > 3 brings that work it could even be put into > production. Note a few things about that 1)In many cases, it has been put into production by people who are actively working on the codebase (as such, they were able to fix issues which affected them, mere mortals like us may not be so lucky). 2)In many cases, those deployments used samba3 only for authentication (this has changed more recently), standard file/print services were run on samba-2.2.x (this is in fact one of the reasons we have samba3 parallel-installable with 2.2.x, so people can try this without significant effort or risk). 3)Even though Andrew Tridgell reckons it's production-ready, and only the documentation needs work, there are still daily changes to core source code, and a number of major changes have been made (renaming of tools, changes in configuration attributes for alpha23 comes to mind) and some features (working ldap group mapping) have only been available recently (also alpha23 IIRC). Alpha24 actually had a bug which was introduced just before release, but I didn't have time to track it or the patch (one of the reasons I wasn't too hasty in trying to fix the build). > > Alpha 24 has some improvements but I noticed that it > was never packaged. I was curious to know but never > bothered to ask. It was packaged, just never went into cooker. IIRC I did announce alpha24 packages for 9.0 and 9.1 on samba-binaries. > I have not gone through the changes > in beta1 but will probably help me in my objective > that is, first replace one of the 6 PDCs by making > Samba3 a BDC first and then switch it to PDC. > > Because of the relationships with other PDCs I could > not incorporate Samba 2.2 as BDC/PDC. > > We have no W2K servers around so I think I have a > better chance of success with this plan. We do have a > few W2K workstations and also a couple of XPs. OK, so your DCs all run NT? This should not be difficult, and it's something I would like to have someone test, as I don't have access to such an environment (we run samba as PDC/BDC on ldap backend, and I have a samba box in an 2k-domain running winbind etc). I think it might be better for us to continue this off-list, anyone else interested in joining can mail me ... I would like to see (depending on how libconf goes etc) some UI support for 'net rpc vampire', which does most of the work you need. > > I am also interested in using LDAP as the backend > therefore my interest in your experience. > You will need LDAP if you are going to be doing PDC/BDC with any version of samba in the near future. > Thanks again for your explanation and look forward to > your input on the status of Samba3/LDAP functionality. > I haven't tested samba3+LDAP too much yet, since I only finished this article this week, and couldn't afford to delay it any longer (I have other more immediate priorities ...) to add samba3 content. I will try and get some of the content there into the samba3 official documentation in conjunction with the samba team. If you haven't read this yet, you should: http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/docs/samba-ldap-advanced.php > On a final note, I have looked around for efforts in > moving distros into the business arena and have the > impression that the Mandrake community is the most > aggressive when it comes to living on the edge. There > are times when this is asking for trouble (in a > business environment) and there are times when it is a > blessing. Note of course that other more "respected" distros do more dangerous things, but most people seem to think a recent php is more dangerous than a cvs snapshot of glibc ... BTW, IMHO, there are only two distros I would consider using for real samba use, and they are Mandrake and SuSE. RH and Debian both have really big issues (one with the way they package, the other one with a choice between an obsolete version of samba and an alpha release, nothing in between). > I guess that the effort to have Samba 3 > ready for 9.2 will give Mandrake a lot of > respectability. My tip off to all cookers. > It's not just samba3 that we need ready, but the tools to support making it easy to use ... and testing of those tools. Anyway, I will have packages for 9.0 and 9.1 up tomorrow, but cooker packages are still giving problems, it seems the filesystem on my cooker box is smoking something, it's generating huge binaries (ie 43MB of smbd, >600MB total in source/bin), and there isn't enough disk space to complete the build, very weird ... I will have to wait till I can get to it to take a look (tomorrow). Regards, Buchan
