Authenticating Externally

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

hi Jeff--

On March 23, jeff at commontext.com said:

 > I should have mentioned that - the "main" server is SUSE PPC.  If
 > it is possible to "authenticate" with SAMBA (obviously that isn't
 > the services purpose)? I am getting VERY little cooperation from my
 > boss/admin and if I can work with the existing setup (avoiding
 > changes, opening ports on the main server, etc) that would be ideal

as other folks have said, working with SAMBA may not be ideal.  But if
you are expected to leave the central server untouched, you can
definitely work with that.

if SMB is the only service being exported from the central server,
look into libpam_mount and winbind.

winbind will help your new system share a users database (and
authentication capabilities) with the central samba server.

pam_mount will help auto-mount your users' home directories as they
log in and unmount them after they log out.

on an ubuntu system, you can start reading more about them with:

 apt-cache show libpam-mount winbind

You can also read up on the theory of operation for winbind here:

http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/winbind.html

hth,

	--dkg