I have a few (~20) workstations dual booted with GNU/Linux and Windows XP. When configuration changes on these systems (about once a month) I deploy a full disk image with UDPcast [1]. Unlike recent versions of Norton Ghost, UDPcast have no post-deploy option to change the machine name and/or trust account. Most of the time those systems are running on GNU/Linux and only occasionally will two of those be running Windows at the same time.
[1]: http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/ The file server is a Debian GNU/Linux system running LDAP, NFS and Samba. Since I deploy new images often I would like to avoid any manual setup on each system. On GNU/Linux I can auto-detect the hostname early in the boot process and set it transparently. I haven't found a way to do that on Windows though. Authentication with Samba running as a PDC is working fine and pam is set to keep the GNU/Linux and Samba passwords in sync. The only part that annoys me with this setup is the machine accounts. Is the machine account. Is it possible to configure Samba to completely ignore the machine account? Would there be major problems in doing this? So far I don't see any advantage in using a machine account. All the user accounts are password protected and the Samba server only allows connection from a narrow IP range. Regards, -- Yannick Gingras -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
