Hi everybody. I attended the Samba conference at the FOSDEM yesterday. Jeremy Allison was great, and explained very clearly the problems faced by implementing an Active Directory controller.
The CIFS protocol is required in heterogenous environments. Jeremy made it pretty clear that even in pure Unix environments, CIFS is quite superior to NFSv4. Samba is thus a required component of pretty much any network, even when using Unix workstations and servers only. Implementing a Samba Active Directory domain controller requires more components than for an NT4 domain controller. Samba will have to integrate an LDAP server, a Kerberos server, a DNS server and a DHCP server. It will have to implement remote registry access and many Windows-related DCE/RPC calls. Those don't make much sense in Unix-only environments. Moreover, the LDAP directory schema will have to match the Microsoft AD schema, which is badly documented to say the least. I'm concerned about all the unneeded features that will be introduced by Samba4 in pure Unix environments, as well as by the implications that Samba4 will have on other services. The LDAP directory will have to implement the Microsoft AD schema, which is not compatible with any current Unix application. How will Samba4 interoperate with groupware softwares for instance ? Has anyone thought about how to mix Unix LDAP-aware applications with Samba4 ? Aren't we pushing bloated, buggy and badly thought Microsoft "standards" to the Unix platform in the name of interoperability without thinking about the consequences this will have on other services and on the overall stability ? Thanks in advance to all of those who will prove me wrong and let me sleep peacefully again :-) Laurent Pinchart -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
