[Preston] Meeting on Wednesday

[Andrew King]

Phil said:

> Yes, as Guy has pointed out, it is almost time for another PLUG meeting,
> there is an agenda on the PLUG website in the "Events" section, but this
> month's meeting will be our first meeting with a theme. To start the ball
> rolling we will be using SAMBA as a discussion topic so if you have any
> knowledge or lack of knowledge that you would like to share with the rest of
> us then please come along.

I went into Samba, and found that although it's great (and worthwhile!) 
once you've got it running, it's a complete absolute total nightmare to 
get it running in the first place (unless you're just using security = 
share, in which case it might not be).

What was particularly difficult as I saw it was synchronising NT and 
UNIX account databases. Winbind is one way of doing this, but has no 
documentation out there anyway apart from man winbindd which is helpful 
but misses out the 28 pitfalls that go wrong while trying to get it 
running, and some sort of overview document as a pdf which doesn't go 
into getting it working. If you look at the Samba newsgroups, you can 
see this - loads of cries for help on how to get it running, but no 
answers, because no-one knows.

I therefore wrote this: http://www.andyroo.demon.co.uk/agw.htm which 
explains in a fair bit of detail how to install it and what to do if you 
encounter an awful lot of different error messages. Only problem is that 
the PAM stuff isn't finished. The rest is there though. I told the samba 
people on the samba-doc mailing list but they took very little notice, 
so they probably think it's crap.

Andrew