Samba: meet LDAP

[Al Gordon]

On 12/16/06, Brian Fahrlander <brian at fahrlander.net> wrote:
>     I've not wrangled Microsoft in many years...what's the Machine entry
> for?  Is there something unholy about using one's account from a
> different machine?

Microsoft network environments let you identify different machines for
purposes of setting Group Policy, etc.  So, you need to be able to
identify each machine in order to join it to a management domain, and
assign it to various groups, each of which has its own set of
associated policies.  You can put policies in place that, for example,
make sure that all of the Marketing PCs get all of the
marketing-specific apps auto-installed on them over the network, and
that the tech support guys do not.  User accounts also belong to one
or more groups, and can have resources mapped to them via their group
memberships.  You can create groups that are location specific as
well, so that any machine added to "Building 2" uses the appropriate
outbound SMTP settings, and so on.

I have heard that Samba 4 is going to implement AD/Group Policy kinds
of features, but I have not actually done any real looking into that
yet.

-- 

  -- AL --