[Samba] Windows XP Home accessing a Samba PDC

Tom Skeren
2005-06-01T17:38:58Z

Richard Gaywood wrote:

>A friend of mine has asked me a question in my role as "biggest local
>geek" (for very small values of "local"). Googling hasn't
turned up an
>answer, so does anyone here know if this is possible?
>
>At his business, they had a mixture of XP Home, XP Pro and Win98
>machines accessing a Samba server with security=user. The server has
>one big everyone-read-write drive and a few smaller areas restricted
>to a few users by the "valid users" directive.
>
>This isn't at all secure though, and means whenever a person gets a
>new computer they have to mess about matching the username and
>password with the Linux server. It is also becoming a pain to manage
>as their network grows, and as they have now removed all the Win98 and
>all except two of the XP Home clients, they are wondering about
>switching Samba to become a PDC. This would allow them a lot more
>flexibility in terms of permissions on the share, even without ACLs.
>
>Obviously, the XP Home machines will not be able to log into the
>domain. However, is there any way to allow them access to the public
>everyone-read-write anyway, even though they are not in the domain?
>
>
Well yeah.  Give them an LDAP account.  Use the map network drive
function on the xp home box, and check reconnect at logon.  Enter
uname/pword in dialogue box.  Make a shortcut to the mapped drive and
put it in the starup folder.  When user reboots the login dialogue will
pop up when the startup folder is accessed by the system.  It's sounds
clunky but it should work.

TMS III

>Thanks for your help!
>
>