I enquired on this list about the problems we were having and the best advice I received was that winbind was now a required service. So I tried using winbind and it seemed to work better, but still not completely reliably. So we just stayed on 3.0.24 Recently changes to the domain mean that we will need to run a recent version of samba. So I've been looking into upgrading. I ran up a copy of 3.5.6 using winbind. But testing indicated that it didn't appear to be respecting secondary groups for the users. It was picking up the primary group for a user ie the one in the password file. But not the secondary groups (specified in /etc/group). Then someone suggested trying without winbind. And that seems to be working OK. But my question is, is there something that I need to be using winbind for. The documentation is a little confusing. I can't find anything that says categorically that winbind is necessary. But the winbind man page says Even if winbind is not used for nsswitch, it still provides a service to smbd, ntlm_auth and the pam_winbind.so PAM module, by managing connections to domain controllers And chapter 24 of the how to says Fact: Winbind is needed to handle users who use workstations that are NOT part of the local domain. But that appears to be to avoid name clashes. Here we're using a unified namespace (from NSS) so name clashes shouldn't be a problem. So was the earlier recommendation I received that winbind was compulsory either incorrect or outdated? Various documentation implies that using winbind without idmap guid (in netlogon proxy only mode) should work the same as not using winbind. In both cases they will pick up user info via NSS. So why is the behaviour different when using winbind and not using winbind =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Robert Cohen Systems & Desktop Services Division of Information R.G Menzies Building Building 2 The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 Australia =20 T: +61 2 6125 8389 F: +61 2 6125 7699 http://www.anu.edu.au =20 CRICOS Provider #00120C =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D --=20 To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba