We use samba as a domain controller and file server for small separate network 
environments.  We've currently got samba configured to get posixAccount and 
sambaAccount information from ldap -- and have nss_ldap configured to feed the 
same posixaccount objects into the posix user account apis via nsswitch.conf 
(getpwent etc...).

In our environments we seem to regularly run into problems which result from 
having the unix accounts populated with information from ldap.  Here are some 
observations:

1. if ldap server(s) become unavailable all getpwent lookups experience long 
timeouts (default nss_ldap behavior)
        -- there are a number of gotchas resulting from this -- including 
having to be careful that nothing which does a passwd lookup starts before the 
ldap server on the server that's running the ldap server ...
2. for security reasons we don't want our samba users to be able to get a login 
shell on our server so we have to implement server access controls to prevent 
this

it seems it would be simpler for us if there was some way to get samba to work 
without requiring local unix accounts for each samba user ...

Is there anyway to get samba to to use ldap for passwd data without 
simultaneously modifying the system-wide settings?  I don't care if samba file 
operations result in files owned by uid's which don't correspond to  
system-wide logins ...  I think it would be sufficient if there was some way to 
point the getpwent() call from samba to a different nsswitch.conf file than the 
api uses when called from everywhere else?

Thanks for any advice,

Ben Cohen
Programmer/Analyst (STS)
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
nco...@ucsd.edu

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