samba - Mar 2019 - Problem achieving manual synchronisation of idmap.ldb and the associated User and Group ID mappings between two Samba 4 AD DCs

On Tue, 26 Mar 2019 12:33:33 +0000
Stephen via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> Roland, Jonathon, what permissions set would you recommend for use
> when syncing SysVol?
> 
> I have only found a single tutorial 
> (https://www.tecmint.com/samba4-ad-dc-sysvol-replication/) that even 
> mentions what permissions should be used when replicating SysVol. ,
> and that suggests using 775 permission set during replication ie:
Go on, I give in, what is wrong with the official Samba documentation
?
> 
> rsync --dry-run -XAavz --chmod=775 --delete-after  --progress
> --stats  /var/lib/samba/sysvol/ root at ad2:/var/lib/samba/sysvol/
> 
> Perhaps its just me but that seems an excessively promiscuous?
And it doesn't really matter, the important permissions are dealt with
by the '-XAavz' part, so to answer your question, tecmint got it wrong
(not for the first time either), you do not need to add the
'--chmod=775' part.

Rowland

Go on, I give in, what is wrong with the official Samba documentation?

Off the top of my head:
1) Your (ie Samba project) docs are structured a little poorly and 
actually pretty hard to follow - eg a single article describes setting 
up Samba both with SAMBA_INTERNAL and BIND which is confusing. Two 
separate articles, one on each topic would be better!

2) Despite being the official documentation its not free of errors, as I 
have just demonstrated. There were two missing essential steps in the 
tutorial to add a backup DC to a domain and this is a very fundamental 
Samba task. Its like the seconds step in setting up a basic Samba setup.

3) They lacks the clear straightforward step by step approach of 
TechMint with screenshots and similar?

4) In practice this means that non-experts cannot / wont be able to use 
Samba, even for basic tasks as I am trying to do here. People less 
determined than me will give up,
and I am basically dependent upon this (awesome, thanks everyone) 
mailing list and its support.

5) You need to get one person to write the docs. Another person should 
then separately *verify* the instructions that are given to avoid simple 
mistakes.

To be absolutely clear - I am trying to be constructive here and 
genunely offer suggestions for improvement. The last thing I want to do 
is insult you and the other Samba devotees and your heroic efforts here 
on this list Rowland.
At the same time quite a few of the the questions that are asked relate 
to pretty basic stuff that wouldn't arise were the official docs clearer 
IMHO.

I know you are all volunteers, time is precious, but I think a little 
bit more up front work on the docs would payoff in the long run and help 
reduce mailing list traffic significantly.

Thanks
Stephen Ellwood

On Tue, 26 Mar 2019 13:08:25 +0000
Stephen via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> Go on, I give in, what is wrong with the official Samba documentation?
> 
> Off the top of my head:
> 1) Your (ie Samba project) docs are structured a little poorly and 
> actually pretty hard to follow - eg a single article describes
> setting up Samba both with SAMBA_INTERNAL and BIND which is
> confusing. Two separate articles, one on each topic would be better!
The problem is that the Samba wiki is written from the perspective of
using a self-compiled version of Samba, not from the perspective of
this is how you use Samba on distro X.
Could you supply a link to the Samba dns page you refer to ?
> 
> 2) Despite being the official documentation its not free of errors,
> as I have just demonstrated. There were two missing essential steps
> in the tutorial to add a backup DC to a domain and this is a very
> fundamental Samba task. Its like the seconds step in setting up a
> basic Samba setup.
Whilst I cannot deny there are errors, I try to fix these errors asap,
but this relies on people give us feedback, something that we do not
really get.
> 
> 3) They lacks the clear straightforward step by step approach of 
> TechMint with screenshots and similar?
Not really a fan of screenshots, unless there is no other way of
displaying information.
> 
> 4) In practice this means that non-experts cannot / wont be able to
> use Samba, even for basic tasks as I am trying to do here. People
> less determined than me will give up,
> and I am basically dependent upon this (awesome, thanks everyone) 
> mailing list and its support.
Again, the wiki was written from the point of view of experts and not
necessarily understandable by 'non-experts'. This needs to be fixed,
but to do this, we need to know what is actually wrong.
> 
> 5) You need to get one person to write the docs. Another person
> should then separately *verify* the instructions that are given to
> avoid simple mistakes.
This not entirely true, one person could do this, make notes as they do
something and then do it again, just following their notes.
> 
> To be absolutely clear - I am trying to be constructive here and 
> genunely offer suggestions for improvement. The last thing I want to
> do is insult you and the other Samba devotees and your heroic efforts
> here on this list Rowland.
> At the same time quite a few of the the questions that are asked
> relate to pretty basic stuff that wouldn't arise were the official
> docs clearer IMHO.
I perfectly understand where you are coming from, I once described the
wiki as 'technically brilliant, but not very useful'.

One problem I see is, if the wiki is altered in the way that you sort
of suggest, which distro do you use ?
> 
> I know you are all volunteers, time is precious, but I think a little 
> bit more up front work on the docs would payoff in the long run and
> help reduce mailing list traffic significantly.
> 
Whilst I agree that altering the wiki will help, again it comes down to
how?

Rowland