rvjcallanan - I feel your pain on this one. For the past 5 years I've been managing two networks running Linux/Samba servers as primary domain controllers with no Microsoft servers and a mix of Linux and Windows clients.
In every distribution that I've tested (Redhat/Suse/Ubuntu/Debian/Slackware), Samba has pretty much been treated as the redhead stepchild. Even in their so called enterprise version, the recommended Samba configurations generally give about as much functionality as directory sharing in Windows 95. Manually editing scripts, installing unsupported packages and compiling software seems to be the rule if you want a fully functional Samba domain controller. Especially if you want to use LDAP, DHCP and Dynamic DNS with Samba. Which to me are the basis of any fully functioning domain controller. And to top it off, most of the information you'll find googling Samba configuration, is either completely outdated or totally wrong. I can't even imagine anyone with limited experience with SMB/CIFS and TCP/IP and LDAP and the rest even attempting to setup a fully functional, mission critical system. Over time it looks like the problem has been that the Samba Team, of whom I have great respect, has been rapidly developing Samba and has never really been happy with any "production" product. Or at least happy enough to maintain a bug-fix only version. And it's really not so much that Windows changes require all of the newest features in the latest Samba. Face it, even Vista with a few tweaks will connect to an old NT file server. It might not have the latest functionality, but if it's new functionality you're looking for, you'll have to upgrade something anyway. It's really more the fact the the Samba Team is always looking ahead to the new version and abandoning the old version and on the way breaking compatibility. Usually the clients aren't affected, but the server configuration definitely is affection from version to version. Anyway, enough rambling . . . you're right. 6.06 by itself doesn't cut it as a Windows domain controller/server unless you're willing to manually install the latest Samba packages because there are really no backports of the latest patches. It might be worth noting though, that there are distributions out there that are getting better. Maybe we need a Samba/OpenLDAP/DHCP/Bind DNS server project that is as easy to use a LAMP. After all there are only so many UNIX servers out there to replace and small and medium businesses out there would be more than willing to give a Linux server a try if it supported their clients out of the box. Ubuntu Small Business Server. Catchy! -- Samba Backport Urgently Needed https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/137656 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
