[H-GEN] How to do single signon and filesharing across platforms at home?

[Robert Stuart]

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Ben Fowler wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> At home, I have PCs running Windows XP and Linux, specifically, Debian
> unstable (and maybe a Mac on the way), as client machines.  I also have
> a Sun Ultra 10 running Solaris acting as a file server.

Yup.

> * File sharing
>    - Samba
>    - NFS
> * Single signon, account management
>    - Samba with NTLM authentication
>    - Samba, bleeding-edge with Active Directory support
>    - LDAP (although I don't know about Windows client support)

Ben, I would recommend using LDAP for storage of all your authentication
data.  You can get Linux to use it via NSS and PAM libraries which should be
available with Debian (I'm a Redhat person).  Mac OSX 10.2 is pretty easy to
get working if you persist a little and don't get frustrated with the poor
technical documentation - its the same as Linux in concept, just getting it
configured is confusing.

I haven't used Samba 3 yet.  Samba 2.2 does a good job, but the key is that
it needs it's own access to LDAP (as well as using PAM and NSS) because it
needs to get to the password hashes.  Windows simply sees Samba as a PDC -
it doesn't need to authenticate to LDAP itself in anyway, Samba handles
authentication - so you don't need anything special on the Windows box.

I'd recommend getting your Samba PDC working first with unix passwd files
and samba password file.  Then get your Unix account data into ldap and
working (including samba still working).  Then move the samba data into your
ldap store.

Good Luck,

Robert




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