Managing your Samba - Active Directory

So how do you  manage the samba active directory setup? does it have a front end?

The easiest way to administer an Active Directory is by using Microsoft RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools) on a Windows machine.

"samba-tool" already contains many features for common administration jobs, but compared with the RSAT, it is still missing many options. Another big advantage of using RSAT, it increases the available documentation (books, online, etc.), because it's the common way Windows administrators are doing these tasks.

 Download and install RSAT from microsoft website and setup using - Add or remove windows programs feature from control panel.

Installation:

•  Install RSAT using the downloaded installer

• Open "Programs and Features" (use the "Start Menu/Metro search to locate the tool).

• Open "Turn Windows features on or off"

Depending on the administrative tasks you want to perform, you choose the features to install. The following are recommended options to be installed for Samba Active Directory installations:

Most of the RSAT tools hide content and menu options in their default setting. To enable all features and display the whole content in each program, go to the "View" menu and activate "Advanced Features". Typically this option is only visible, when you've marked the root of the tree view.

Ref:

1. Installing RSAT

Hope this helps :)

Setup your free Active Directory in linux :)

Hey Guys!

So we had to decommission our Active Directory server as it was running on pretty old hardware and win 2003. With the cost factor involved we decided to give linux based domain controller a try. All my initial thoughts was to use ldap as thats what we normally refer to as AD alternative for linux, unfortunately things were not as easy as it seemed to be. we could only add linux machines or users to the ldap and the guy who manages the system ( who provisions machines and user accounts ) found it difficult to use ldap frontend.

So there started the search for something simpler and easy to manage and voila here comes SAMBA 4. Samba 4 ?? are you crazy its used for sharing files to windows machines how can you even compare it with Active Directory! its true :) I am just quoting the details from samba wiki here as its very much informative.

Things to look out for

1. DNS - super important as everything depends on how dns setup is configured. So extra care needs to be done while this is setup. Almost 90% of issues arises due to incorrect DNS setups
2. Use of static IPs instead of dhcp.

Explanations for the links shared below.

1. This one pretty much helps you setup the primary DC
2. The second link helps you to setup a failover/setup

Ref:

1. Setup a Samba Active Directory Domain Controller
2. Join an additional Samba DC to an existing Active Directory
3. Check and fix DNS entries on DC joins

Hope this helps ;)

Check out the blog for more details on how to manage the Samba DC from a windows machine like you do with Active Directory.