Ask Slashdot: Is Samba4 a Viable Alternative To Active Directory? 388
First time accepted submitter BluPhenix316 writes "I'm currently in school for Network Administration. I was discussing Linux with my instructor and he said the problem he has with Linux is he doesn't know of a good alternative to Active Directory. I did some research and from what I've read Samba4 seems very promising. What are your thoughts?"
Re:Dumb Question is Dumb (Score:5, Informative)
Samba 4 *is* intended to be a full AD implementation. Currently it has a built in LDAP and Kerberos server set in the same daemon. That is a problem
for some, like myself, that use Samba 3 + LDAP for shared auth. When complete is *should* be a fairly complete implementation of the AD specs, all
of them. I have no idea how long this will take, or just how complete it is, but those are the design goals. All of this is a result of Microsoft releasing the
full spec due to the European Union lawsuit.
Re:No (Score:4, Informative)
Poor administration is not the software / OS fault.
Re:Misunderstand of what SAMBA actually is...... (Score:5, Informative)
I also commented above, Samba 4 *is* intended to be a full AD server implementation. It is using the documents Microsoft was forced to release
as a result of an EU lawsuit.
How complete an implementation it ends up being and how well it works will have to wait to be seen once it exits Alpha status and gets a few
beta releases under it's belt.
It's a whole new samba in the end.
Nein. (Score:5, Informative)
Back in the day .. well June (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot discussion about Samba 4's Beta release Samba 4 Enters Beta [slashdot.org]
Re:Not yet. (Score:3, Informative)
I may have to put up a test copy then. I suspect there are few real world test cases being run, but an RC is far enough along
for me to justify spending some cycles at work on it. There are more samba 3 + LDAP setups out there than people may realise
and all of them stand to benefit from Samba 4.
Re:Mixed results in a mixed environment (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not yet. (Score:5, Informative)
I've got four offices running various versions of Samba4 on ZFS, up to the latest git head pull. Some of those offices have been running alpha versions for two years without an issue, we mostly use it for roaming profiles and AD user management. Some portions don't work as well as a pure Microsoft environment may, like how many GPO setting changes appear to do nothing (like to try disabling CTRL+ALT+DEL before entering a password).
It works for roaming profiles and it works well, but managing permissions (userid mapping, etc) between SMB4 and Linux is a pain the ass. Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough.
Several of the AD configurators don't really do anything to the Samba4 installation, like managing shares. Changing ownership and making sure things are world-readable (like a common share) is also a kludge, something that shouldn't be true in a production ready software package.
Samba 4 changes everythying (Score:5, Informative)
Since 2005, The combination of OpenLDAP, Heimdal Kerberos, and Samba 3 has been a staple in the Linux Infrastructure, with other services such as FreeRadius, NFSv4, and AFS being tacked on for good measure.
Many if not most Linux based utilities support LDAP. Unlike Samba 3, which functioned as an OpenLDAP based application, Samba 4 completely replaces OpenLDAP, and Heimdal Kerberos. Consider the following. Samba 3, while far beyond what Windows NT4 was ever capable of, expanded the NT4 Domain concept far beyond it' design limiations. In the most recent era, Samba 3.5 and 3.6, created an enhanced form of NT Domain Authentication just for interoperability with Windows 7. (This is very fascinating because it uses Windows 2003 Sign and Seal with NT4 Authentication, something NT4 never could do.) So it can be be said, while Windows 7 expressly drops support for Windows NT4, Windows 7 has express support for Samba 3.
Yet the sword of Damoclese has swung over the head of Samba 3.x for a long while. Vista dropped support for NT4 Style System Policies, requiring administrators to resort to registry Trickery with Wine and third party policy tools such as NitroBit.
Samba 3 brought about a form of NT Domain that supported LDAP as a backend, could use Kerberos for Authentication both for file shares and joining the Domain. (Although only other Samba clients could utilize the Kerberos aspects of Samba 3.) Could delf out policy by OU. With help from OpenLDAP, Samba 3 could overcome the single PDC limitation, and all Samba Domain Controllers could be writable PDCs because OpenLDAP supported Multi-master Replication.
Beyond Samba, FreeRadius could use LDAP for authentication, Evolution could garner configuration information from OpenLDAP, for IMAP and SMTP settings (CalDAV Support was never added, even though there were feilds in the OpenLDAP schema for the three CalDAV based Calendar, Addressbook, and Task List.) This cooperated with eGroupware. Sudo could draw Sudoers from OpenLDAP, as could NSS. Each had their own unique Schemas.
Unlike when Windows moved from NT4 Domains too AD, the movement was simple, before, you had no Directory Service, and now, boom! you do. In the Linux world LDAP has been a reality for a long time. Many applications are built to participate in Open Directory based Domains based on OpenLDAP Schemas. What happens if the Schemas conflict definitions? How will this be resolved?"
Re:Not yet. (Score:5, Informative)
Unless I missed something, Samba 4 is not in Alpha release anymore. It has gone through beta, and is now in release candidate stage. (rc4 currently) It is designed as a full Active Directory implementation (including DNS and LDAP)
Re:Nein. (Score:3, Informative)
A simple browse through the forums quickly showed this is simply not true. Reading on how to enable Outlook integration confirmed that. Same old same old. It's alright if you have available time, a client willing to pay for the learning curve, and users comfortable with "out of mainstream" software. If you have clients like these, count yourself lucky.
Samba4 works great for small offices (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
The basic samba code has indeed been around for decades, and it's great.
Do be aware that samba4 release candidate 4 only got released on 30th October 2012 and as the announcement says "This is the first release candidate of Samba 4.0.0! This is *not* intended for production environments and is designed for testing purposes only.".
http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-announce/2012/000277.html [samba.org]
Re: Puppet for config/package to Windows? (Score:4, Informative)
Puppet has a server and client setup. The Puppet server process is Unix only.
MSI packages are supported. I'm not sure about group policies yet.
Re:Nein. (Score:0, Informative)
SOGo [www.sogo.nu] is a groupware server which recently added Exchange protocol compatibility using Samba4 - just sayin...
Re:Dumb Question is Dumb (Score:5, Informative)
...it has a built in LDAP and Kerberos server set in the same daemon. That is a problem...
The reason is that M$'s implementation of things like LDAP is broken. So a standard LDAP (or Kerberos) server is not going to work.
E.g., OUs that really aren't (In AD, OUs are just cosmetic). There are attributes associated with objects that break LDAP spec. etc.
Microsoft broke Kerberos just enough to prevent using a standard Kerberos server setup, but works to use std. clients against AD.
Microsoft broke DNS in the 90s. They allowed things like underscores in names which are illegal according to spec-- all standard DNS servers now allow underscores to allow interop with the broken M$ implementation. There is even a DNS RFC that comes just short of naming M$ which calls out that they butchered and abused DNS in their AD implementation-- this abuse interoperates with current DNS servers, though. so this isn't a reason for including their own DNS.
So, rather than breaking every other existing software package, or trying to maintain a bunch of patch sets, Samba just includes its own implementation of the above with breakage compatible with M$'s breakage.
Re:No (Score:4, Informative)
Is it fair, to say, then, that Samba4 and AD are both good choices for people with strong admin background, but perhaps AD is a beter choice for someone who, for instance, administers the server in addition to other business tasks?
Not really.
If you want to admin Windows, then admin Windows, but don't pretend there's anything particularly challenging about setting up and managing Samba4 on Linux. Just step through one of the many guides. e.g: http://praxis.edoceo.com/howto/samba4 [edoceo.com]
Slashdot's an Apple/Microsoft site now, so most of the comments here will be FUD. That shouldn't deter anyone with an interest from trying Samba4. It's simple enough that even a MSCE shouldn't have a problem.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No (Score:4, Informative)
Your problem isn't AD, its that grand total of zero IT staff.
Get an external IT person, have them come in and configure and manage the servers for you periodically, and call them when you need things changed instead of hacking at it yourself and you'll have a much better experience no matter which software they use.
I administer over a dozen Samba sites remotely via SSH and have no issues with it, I'd expect you can find admins to do the same if you shop around.
Re:hahahahahah (Score:5, Informative)
to do which functions and to scale to what size? login authentication for 100 users in a medium sized business works very well, the medical office management company I set up with vmware and linux servers (but windows desktops) has been working very well that way for 3 years already.....
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
You need to install Kerberos. That is what Active Directory is, see: LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, and file/print sharing, all rolled up into a nice package. It appears the Ubuntu package doesn't include it as a dependency, which it should, so I would blame the package manager.
I agree, the docs need to be better, but Samba4 hasn't officially been released yet.
Re:hahahahahah (Score:5, Informative)
References:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/997424/active-directory-vs-openldap [stackoverflow.com]
http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/200507/msg00185.html [openldap.org]
http://blog.is4u.be/search?q=openldap [is4u.be]
Re:Dumb Question is Dumb (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft broke DNS in the 90s. They allowed things like underscores in names which are illegal according to spec-- all standard DNS servers now allow underscores to allow interop with the broken M$ implementation. There is even a DNS RFC that comes just short of naming M$ which calls out that they butchered and abused DNS in their AD implementation-- this abuse interoperates with current DNS servers, though. so this isn't a reason for including their own DNS.
Not really correct. The DNS specification in RFC1035 from 1987 allows the use of underscores in names. This has never changed.
This is a common misconception because the use of underscores in hostnames IS prohibited and this remains true. Microsoft chose the use of underscores in thier AD implementation to remove the possibility of name-space collision with hostnames. BIND, the most popular DNS server in use only permits underscores in hostnames when an option is set to override the default.
Microsoft has broken lots of standards either because they didn't understand them or found it advantageous to ignore them, but this is NOT one of them.
Re:No (Score:4, Informative)
Your link itself noted glitches in Samba4:
The first one is kind of major, I would think: You can't even browse a network?!