A couple of days ago, I was given the task of replacing a mail server -- old
hardware, network topology changes, and personnel changes led up to this.
Now, the actual swapout of a mail server is relatively straightforward and
(somewhat) easy to do. But this one had a wrench -- I had to authenticate
off of an NT4 domain. There were some other, smaller, wrenches as well, but
they have nothing to do with this story.
Lost, I started out simple -- pam_smb_auth. I compiled this and examined
the code and installed it and tried to authenticate, and recompiled and
reinstalled and tried again, and recompiled and reinstalled... This went on
for a couple of hours, each time trying something a little bit differently.
I looked at other pam_smb_auth setups, and they were all working, but this
one wasn't. Then I found out that the author doesn't guarantee that
pam_smb_auth will work on a FreeBSD machine.
Oops.
So I moved over to Samba. I'm now kicking myself in the ass; I should have
*known* to start here. The FreeBSD ports tree helped out a fair bit, but
one make command and twenty minutes later, I changed my domain information,
netbios name, and joined the domain. Then it took me all of two minutes to
get pam_winbind installed (the ports system doesn't install it, strangely)
and authenticating.
No hassles, no problems. It just worked.
So while I've done my share of complaining in the past, I just thought
I'd
extend an overwhelming Thanks! to the Samba team. You've made my life
easier, and blown everyone else out of the water with how easy this all was.
- Damian
