samba - Aug 2005 - Possible to use 2 LDAP-Servers for different purposes?

Hi,

is it possible to realize the following scenario? And if yes: how? ;)

The current setup is as follows:
We have a Samba 3 server on a linux machine as PDC and an OpenLDAP
server as passdb backend (on the same host). All users and groups were
inserted via the SMBLDAP tools by IDEALX. So far, so good. Everything
runs fine.

Now our plan is it to use another, external LDAP server for pure
authentication. This means the external LDAP server should _NOT_
contain the (most) Samba schema attributes for the users.

The idea behind this is that we will soon have one single
user-database for all campus-users (students and employees) at our
campus and if a user is registered there he should gain access to our
samba domain as well. But as there might be several other samba
domains on our campus we cannot store those samba schema attributes in
the "master LDAP" (for example the users profile is at a different
location in another domain).

The only way out i can think of (other proposals are welcome!) is that
Samba accesses two different LDAP-servers. The first one only for
authentication (does the user exist at all? and did he provide the
correct password?) and the second one for the storage of all his
domain-specific attributes like "where is my homedrive?", "where
is my
profile located" and so on. If the user was authenticated successfully
but doesn't exist in the local LDAP server, the "add user script"
will
add him.

Perhaps the "password server" configuration directive could be the
solution but as i read the manpage some questions arise: 1. How
exactly does samba authenticate a user if an LDAP server was entered?
What attributes are checked? 2. Specifying the "password server"
option only works with security = [ads|domain|server]. Is it still
possible that samba works as a primary domain controller afterwards?

I believe this is a very complex problem and i will be very happy if
anyone has anything to say about it. :-)

If there are any questions, feel free to ask! Maybe i wasn't exactly
enough. :)

mfg,
Oliver Heering
Medienzentrum der Universit?t Dortmund
http://www.medienzentrum.uni-dortmund.de

Oliver Heering wrote:
> 
> Now our plan is it to use another, external LDAP server for pure
> authentication. This means the external LDAP server should _NOT_
> contain the (most) Samba schema attributes for the users.
 >
 > The idea behind this is that we will soon have one single
 > user-database for all campus-users (students and employees) at our
 > campus and if a user is registered there he should gain access to our
 > samba domain as well. But as there might be several other samba
 > domains on our campus we cannot store those samba schema attributes in
 > the "master LDAP" (for example the users profile is at a
different
 > location in another domain).
 >
 > The only way out i can think of (other proposals are welcome!) is that
 > Samba accesses two different LDAP-servers. The first one only for
 > authentication (does the user exist at all? and did he provide the
 > correct password?) and the second one for the storage of all his
 > domain-specific attributes like "where is my homedrive?",
"where is my
 > profile located" and so on. If the user was authenticated
successfully
 > but doesn't exist in the local LDAP server, the "add user
script" will
 > add him.

Really need two servers?, any samba user in the ldap master server have a
sambaDomainName,
it can be used in smb.conf to let this user get usage in his domain.

The standars solutions are:
- slave ldap servers, you can use them for each samba server, only need to get a
copy of
things you need, and any server have his own access.

- kerberos server, well, is better, is complex, is... ####, You can try if you
want, a lot
of people is using it, remember, kerberos is usable for passwords and samba for
the other
stuff. For example i'm using heimdal kerberos over ldap, and i create the
samba users and
the heimdal user at the same time.

-- 
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Alejandro Escanero Blanco
Administrador Sistemas
Centro Europeo De Congresos
Tel. +34 952058050
e-mail: alejandro.escanero@chlgrupo.com
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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