dovecot - Jul 2012 - Slightly OT - Winbind and remote authentication.

Hi

I was doing some research on setting up a samba server for my internal
network (as an alternative to NAS).  The setup looks easy enough, but
then I got to thinking - I already have an internet host with an mysql
DB that has usernames and passwords and it would be simpler all round
to reuse that as the authentication server.  That server is also
running Dovecot, so I thought it might be simpler still to set up
samba to authenticate using IMAP (the mysql server is not accessible
on port 3306 anyway).  A quick google resulted in a suggestion from
Robert (who by now must be on every single list I'm on or rather
vice-versa) about using winbind.  I went off to the link he posted -
http://wiki.dovecot.org/Authentication/Mechanisms/Winbind?highlight=%28winbind%29
and the problem is that seems to indicate bind and dovecot are on the
same server.

So, this not being the samba list notwithstanding, is it possible to
use a remote dovecot host as an authentication back-end on a local
samba installation?

Cheers

Simon

On 27.7.2012, at 20.01, Simon Brereton wrote:
> I was doing some research on setting up a samba server for my internal
> network (as an alternative to NAS).  The setup looks easy enough, but
> then I got to thinking - I already have an internet host with an mysql
> DB that has usernames and passwords and it would be simpler all round
> to reuse that as the authentication server.  That server is also
> running Dovecot, so I thought it might be simpler still to set up
> samba to authenticate using IMAP (the mysql server is not accessible
> on port 3306 anyway).  A quick google resulted in a suggestion from
> Robert (who by now must be on every single list I'm on or rather
> vice-versa) about using winbind.  I went off to the link he posted -
>
http://wiki.dovecot.org/Authentication/Mechanisms/Winbind?highlight=%28winbind%29
> and the problem is that seems to indicate bind and dovecot are on the
> same server.
That link is about Dovecot authenticating via Samba, not vice versa.
> So, this not being the samba list notwithstanding, is it possible to
> use a remote dovecot host as an authentication back-end on a local
> samba installation?
No idea, but I think at least some Samba auth mechanisms probably want to have
access to the plaintext password.