hughk's Journal: Dancing the Samba

A long time ago, I had Samba working quite happily in a Windows NT 4.0 Domain. Since then, I had changed the domain server to Win 2K active directory and wanted to Samba my gateway system (192.168.0.1), which is running Linux. Samba 3.0 now has support for Windows Active Directory Services (ADS) and some (limited) documentation.

At least the gateway system is running Linux now. In a previous incarnation it was running 2K as a backup domain controller (with the same address) and it had since been reformatted and Linux installed.

That was the problem. The PDC thought that the gateway system was still running as a BDC but was playing stupid. Unfortunately, I couldn't use another IP address for the gateway system and lacked the patience to reinstall Windows 2K.

The usual Active Directory GUI didn't allow to wipe out my old BDC without consulting with the BDC (which only existed on a backup). After some Googling around and fighting with Microsoft's hopeless search facility, I finally found something called Ntdsutil.exe or something which allowed me to wipe out the BDC.

Still no luck, Samba just couldn't get hooked up with my PDC. I eventually found out that the PDC still thought that the gateway system was a Windows box. This needed some further puring of the PDC's DNS. Note that a Win2K Server PDC really wants to have its own DNS.

Yes, I got the old rubbish cleaned off the PDC and the systems started talking. However browing the Samba system from Windows resulted in the Windows desktop crashing.

Ho hum, all in an evening's work!