samba - Dec 2004 - Replacement of a windows 2000 PDC with active directory by samba/LDAP

Hi

I'm currently working on a project aiming at replacing all windows
servers (about 20) in my company by linux servers. Some of these windows
servers are windows 2000 domain controlers (one PDC and few BDCs) with
active directory. We have about 900 client windows 2000 workstations and
about 2/3 of them are domain members.

Our goal is to replace the windows servers that are domain controlers by
samba servers, and of course, to avoid as much as possible a migration
of the windows workstations because that would be a very long and human
resource intensive task.

Reading the samba documentation, I understand that samba 3 can act
roughly like a windows NT 4 PDC, but not like an active directory
server. My first conclusion is that our windows domain will probably
have to "downgrade" to a "NT 4 like" domain, but I don't
really know
what impact this will have on windows 2000 workstations.

So these are my questions:
- Will we be able to achieve the replacement of the windows 2000 PDC et
BDCs without any action on windows workstations ? Or should we prepare
for bad days of workstations migration ?

- Does anybody have a similar experience ? 

Thanks for your help.

-- 
Olivier Navas
Groupement Informatique et T?l?communications
SDIS 33

On Fri, 2004-12-24 at 11:24 +0100, Olivier Navas wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I'm currently working on a project aiming at replacing all windows
> servers (about 20) in my company by linux servers. Some of these windows
> servers are windows 2000 domain controlers (one PDC and few BDCs) with
> active directory. We have about 900 client windows 2000 workstations and
> about 2/3 of them are domain members.
Is this a native mode, or mixed mode domain?
> Our goal is to replace the windows servers that are domain controlers by
> samba servers, and of course, to avoid as much as possible a migration
> of the windows workstations because that would be a very long and human
> resource intensive task.
Indeed!
> Reading the samba documentation, I understand that samba 3 can act
> roughly like a windows NT 4 PDC, but not like an active directory
> server. My first conclusion is that our windows domain will probably
> have to "downgrade" to a "NT 4 like" domain, but I
don't really know
> what impact this will have on windows 2000 workstations.
> 
> So these are my questions:
> - Will we be able to achieve the replacement of the windows 2000 PDC et
> BDCs without any action on windows workstations ? Or should we prepare
> for bad days of workstations migration ?
This very much depends, native mode domains are very hard to work with,
but a mixed mode domain *should* be possible.

I've done some investigatory work recently that should allow us to
overcome the 'no passwords in vampire' problem, if that turns out to be
a blocker.  (I have shown in Samba4 how to get the passwords, but samba3
doesn't use this yet).  Otherwise, I would suggest just trying it.  If
you vampire into a distinct test network, then you can take aside a few
of your test machines (you have a test network, and test workstations,
right?) and see what works, what fails.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet@samba.org
Authentication Developer, Samba Team            http://samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet@hawkerc.net

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