Samba Vs. NFS client tools

[Haitham Hamad]

Currently I am using Solstice to connect our PC/windows 95 clients to our HP9000 server. I have 3 mount points on the PCs, 2 of them are applications. We are upgrading the pc's to windows 2000 and solstice doesnot support w2k. Could Samba do the same thing. What about authentications, does the pcs have to have the users ids and password stored locally?. With Solstice, anyone can mount the server directories from any pcs, I am not sure if Samba can do that. Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

Haitham

[John Poff]

I use Samba here but I'm not a wizard about the Windows login part of it. I believe you can get Samba to use the same login authentication that Windows does, so that you won't have to keep separate login information.


Here is part of the Samba 2.2 Release notes from http://samba.anu.edu.au/samba

----------------------------------------------------------------------
WHATS NEW IN Samba 2.2.0
========================

This is the official Samba 2.2.0 release. This version of Samba provides
the following new features and enhancements.

Integration between Windows oplocks and NFS file opens (IRIX and Linux
2.4 kernel only). This gives complete data and locking integrity between
Windows and UNIX file access to the same data files.

Ability to act as an authentication source for Windows 2000 clients as
well as for NT4.x clients.

Integration with the winbind daemon that provides a single
sign on facility for UNIX servers in Windows 2000/NT4 networks
driven by a Windows 2000/NT4 PDC. winbind is not included in
this release, it currently must be obtained separately. We are
committed to including winbind in a future Samba 2.2.x release.

Support for native Windows 2000/NT4 printing RPCs. This includes
support for automatic printer driver download.

[Shannon Petry]

First, you are right about solstice not supporting windblows 2Krash, however the next generation Sun tool for this is PC Netlink, and works just fine!

However, Samba will allow you to share the data. It can run as a domain authority for NT, but make sure to modify the default for NO encryption on passwords to encryption. After that, your samba server needs to be setup for the primary domain server, and all authentication can occur off of that server.

Regards,
Shannon

[Haitham Hamad]

Does this mean that the HP server has to be the password server for all the pcs on the network. Currently we have a novell server for that?

[Shannon Petry]

Hmmm, there are a few ways to acccomplish this...but, here it is in a nutshell...

Samba is made to be a m$ networking server..It covers ntlm, as well as netbios for sharing data, and printers. and yes, it can share both with winblows!

Unless there is something for Novell to allow compatability to ntlm, and you have the HP join that domain, then you will have to have 2 sets of auth going....

One of course if your Novell has an LTLM clone, add the HP to the domain as a trusted host, join the domain, and use it for primary auth....

I guess if you think of what an nt server does for clients, that is what samba does too..

Regards,
Shannon