samba - May 2007 - Creating a samba BDC How-to:

All,

I help run a school and we have a samba domain (no windows servers). I am
however fearful of something happening and creating a school-wide outage if
my PDC goes down. What is all involved in creating a BDC and to connect to
my PDC?

In addition, I have another question about pdc / bdc and user data. With a
PDC/ BDC infrastructure set up, am I supposed to have all the data (homes
drives, shares, etc) on a separate machine so then if a PDC goes down, the
BDC can serve the same files?

How does a BDC / PDC work in terms of where to store files? I am also
currently using the /etc/samba/smbpasswd for username /passwords, but I am
looking at going to LDAP... Any direction and just a 'nutshell' response
to
pdc /bdc with samba would be helpful.

Thanks,
~ Aaron

> In addition, I have another question about pdc / bdc and user data. With a
> PDC/ BDC infrastructure set up, am I supposed to have all the data (homes
> drives, shares, etc) on a separate machine so then if a PDC goes down, the
> BDC can serve the same files?
>
We actually have no shares on the pdc or bdc we have them only for
logins. Our user shares are on a third and more powerful box that is a
domain member server.

John

> That makes more sense. Thanks for the clarification.  Do you use ldap to
> sync passwords between pdc and bdc?
>
Yes, and for that we have 2 ldap servers.

John