trying to replace NT4 with samba

[bdina]

I have an old PII under NT4 that services my office with authentication on an NT4 domain. I have just received a nice 1U that I would like to be our new authentication server, I would also like to discontinue the use of MS server OS's in my building. What I need to do in order to do this is place my samba server in place of the NT4 server, and have this done without the knowlege of the user, meaning I can not go around my office and join the domain for all of my clients. I have so far been able to create a replica of my office by hand, inputting 56 user accounts, I then try to create the computer account manually and just plug my computer into the lab lan I have for testing, the client machine complains that there is either no computer account for that domain or the username/password I have supplied is incorrect. So, I have next tried to join the domain, which works, however that would mean I would have to then rejoin all of my clients PC's to make this work. Currently the samba box is a stock Red Hat 9.0 box with all current updates applied via up2date, and samba 3.0 installed via the samba 3.0 rpm supplied by the samba.org contribs. Can this be done?

 

[jad]

Ok ... is the samba server called the same (on your network) as the server you want to replace?
is it in the same workgroup/domain as the machine you want it to replace?
have you done the smbpasswd for each machine you want to connect?

 

[bdina]

yeah, same name, same passwords, the computer accounts are not there until either I join the domain or I manually create them... if I manually create them, the login will not work, if I join the domain it works like magic. Basically I want to know everything that happens when you join a domain so that I can manually join a computer and have it work, and I mean totally do it manual.

--Bryan

 

[jad]

i take it you've already looked at:

http://de.samba.org/samba/ftp/docs/htmldocs/samba-pdc-faq.html#AEN116

i'm sure there used to be a script to extract all the old passwords from a primary domain controller so that you can set up your machine as the primary domain controller ... but i can't find it.

can you set up your machine as a BDC pointing at the PDC (old machine) and grab the passwords to save you time?

 

[bdina]

I might be able to, but I am unsure how. Also, is it possible to promote the samba BDC up to a PDC?

 

[jad]

to tell you the truth i haven't upgraded to Samba 3, yet, and we've never had an NT PDC ... i could look for you if you needed but you'd probably find it as well yourself ...

Jon