Re: [Hampshire] Happy Happy Joy Joy

>>> Samba4 is now in Alpha release *vbg*.
>>
>> Woohoo! This is great news,
>
> I might agree with you if I understood what the implications of Samba4
> are...

In a mixed Windows/Linux network (or even in a pure Windows environment),
you will frequently encounter Active Directory, which runs the
authentication across the network, allowing single sign-on, etc.

Now the thing to realise about AD - the real salient point - is that it's
a perversion of LDAP. It's *almost* LDAP, which is a nice, well-defined
standard. But it isn't LDAP. It's a Microsoft-only protocol Embraced and
Extended from LDAP, just ready for the Extinguish...

Samba3 (which we all use) has been modified to join AD domains. and you
can run a Linux box as a client or a member server quite happily within an
AD domain. But you still need a Windows box to be the domain controller;
you can only control the domain if you downgrade the authentication to
NTLM (which is crap).

But Samba4 changes that. Samba4 will allow Linux boxen to be AD domain
controllers. That means we can get rid of those horrific 2003server and
SBS boxen, and replace them with friendly Linux installs. Which is nice
:-)

Vic.