AD DC+SAMBA share+Windows Clients works, now how to work with Linux clients?

sashaluda · January 19, 2023, 9:26am

Wow. That was very educational and revealing. Thank you.

My experience with IT is very limited and focuses more on devices and their local software than networking: ZX Spectrum, CP/M, Z80 Assembler, MS DOS, BASIC, Pascal, C++, MS Visual FoxPro, 68k Macs+Networking, Proxy servers and Windows 3.1 networking, bunch of different Linux on PC, Palm, first Android, bunch of WiFi routers, NT4 DC Ubuntu server 12.04, smart switches, and finally bunch of beautiful and fun Linux server software (NethServer, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Webmin, pfSense, ntopng, Moodle, Joomla…)

Since I graduated in 1996, you can imagine that most of the things I learned – I learned myself. I’m even trying to do a little Kotlin. But I am truly captivated by Linux server software. How amazing it is, and how well developed it is, and how quickly it is growing.

So, what you explained is really cool. I understand that in reality the concepts of communication and protocols, files and file systems, data and databases – not an area for reinventing a wheel. The only reason to “reinvent a wheel” is to avoid legal fees, or try to improve the speed. That is why Mac desktop interface in 1984 conceptually isn’t much different from 2023. Reason and simplicity rule.

So, returning to the topic, yes, adding LDAP to AD resolves all online authentication problems… So, there is no need to try to do away with AD. I see this now. Then I should focus on learning how to join Linux clients to AD domain the least painful way (I have lots of such clients). I’ll be looking for options. Ubuntu was a surprise to me when they started including “join AD domain” during install. I wanted to try it. Although currently I like Manjaro better. Maybe there is a nice solution for Manjaro (their AUR is awesome).

Thank you,
Sasha

pike · January 19, 2023, 10:50am

Yeah… no.
The rise of Linux ended at mittle tens, Linux currently is an important reality and an asset for a huge load of developers and customers.
Linux is a base from all biggest company take from for not deal with some kind of issues, feeding with money or developers or both the projects that are more interesting to them. No one is developing OS or stacks from scratch, everyone using old things and evolving them, sometimes with patches, sometimes with deep rewrote.
From Cupertino brags about Unix, but elsewere… Linux is king. And as a Redmond user, i have to admit that. Android Phones? Linux. Lots of CPEs? Linux. Firewall appliances? Linux. Switches and network equipment? Linux. Azure base OS? AFAIK, Linux. Not kidding. GPLv3 frees the necessity for acquire licenses. However, everything “spicy” built on top need to share not even a smidge of the code, or copyright not goes into shares.
Some says it’s useless to reinvent the wheel. Well, sometimes i’d love that someone redesign from scratch the whole mechanism. Kernel started with i386, one core and less than 100mhz. It passed through i don’t know how many revamps and rewrote, implementing different kind of cores, more cache than of older PCs (latest Genoa Epyc hit 384mb L3 cache!), several kinds of pipelining and jumping around so many different kind of architectures.
Ok, snap back to reality, here goes gravity.
SaaS paradigm want to tel the people “don’t buy your infrastructure, lend ours”. On updates, has quite a lot of sense; on information control and dependancy well… I’m still telling customers if they want to make receipts and factures only when internet works.
This leads to a lot of interesting decisions…

Andy_Wismer · January 19, 2023, 11:11am

Hi @sashaluda

Sounds you might be familiar with some of these…

Todays playpen:

Not productive, but suitable for testing, learning, software trials or just for fun.
Can’t beat a real Mac, but still’s fun…

My 2 cents
Andy

To join Nethservers AD from almost any Linux, see here:

Andy_Wismer · January 19, 2023, 11:17am

@pike

One of the only mainstays of Apple is:

It just works, then when you need it.

Creative Users like musicians, artists and the like still prefer Mac to any Windows or Linux…

And finance people?

Well, they buy either Apple or MS stocks, hardly any Linux.

In any case, in 2023 ALL of us are using more than 640K RAM…

My 2 cents
Andy

sashaluda · January 19, 2023, 12:27pm

Oh yeah! Basilisk II (still using it for my 7 y.o. daughter), Shapeshifter, PearPC (never got off the ground PowerPC CPU emulation). MacOS 7.6 (sweet and best). It’s amazing that Basilisk II could run MacOS 8.1 and get online via Netscape Navigator… Just the sound of those words put in one sentence … Oh…

Now I have four Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB, 8GB, 4GB, 2GB). 4 watt consumption server passive cooling – one with family Nextcloud+Jellyfin (Ubuntu Server 20.04) 128GB M.2 external system + 2TB external HDD data, the other my son’s Minecraft server (Ubuntu Server 20.04), 3rd – Recalbox (with my favorite 8bit and 16bit games + Kodi. We actually played original Mario Bros with my son and daughter – the one with Mario and Luigi on one screen flipping turtles/crabs/flies/…), and 4th pi is just waiting to become another useful server…
s-l500

Toys for boys

So, I’m ready to install ARM version of Nethserver (actually there was one port already…). It would be great to use it as my firewall+file server+Nextcloud…

P.S. There is a real working Mac Performa in my daughter’s room with Mac OS 7.6

pike · January 19, 2023, 1:50pm

Not nowadays.
A lot of System 9 users stopped considering Cupertino reliable after Mountain Lion, and I keep asking myself why Apple want to do both worst email clients ever for computers and portable devices with Mail for Mac OS XI and iOs.
Apple took five giant leaps during its history and came out wonderfully, the biggest was MacOS X, throwing away all the legacy code for the ground-up NeXTSTEP newborn.
But the quality of code and releases sunked, which was not for Redmond, increasing stability, performances, flexibility and patching. I mean… PrintNightMare was patched for OSes date 2009! Cupertino asks for money every 5 years…

But getting back to the clients devices, there are more android phones than laptops in the world. And I know you know perfectly which is the kernel of Android…

Andy_Wismer · January 19, 2023, 5:07pm

@pike

Android is the first, large scale commercialized, special use Linux OS.

And from it’s creator: One of their WORST mistakes ever!

Why?
It does work as a phone and can be considered the second smartphone after iPhone…

But?
It wasn’t intended to be a phone, it’s main use is data-collector, second use as phone…

And?
They forgot / overlooked the most important thing: system wide or almost system wide internal communications… Apple “enhanced” SMS. Google missed that lesson in school…

Facebook, the second largest advertising evil in the world, bought WhatsApp, which covered what was missing on Android…

Just like buying your opponent a baseball bat, to give you “clues” why…
They gave their biggest competitor a free access platform, called Android, to run WhatsApp - and collect data before Google using Google’s tool…

Apple

Since Jobs left, a lot of the quality, genius, ingenieuity that Apple had is gone. Tim has too small feet to wear Steve’s shoes!

It’s the same with a lot of music / musicians…

Look at Roger Waters - he thinks he’s the greatness which made Pink Floyd great…
The sum of all members made the greatness of Pink Floyd, not the musical Nobody Roger Waters is alone.

The Wall, one of Pink Floyds greatest Epos, and created almost exclusively by Roger Waters, was also ruined by the same man, inviting Cyndi Lauper to be on stage during the Wall in Berlin…

Maybe his greed for money made him mentally as sick as John McAfee, who became sicker when he sold his company McAffee for a lot of $$$ (to Intel)…

Note: The Enterprise AV of McAfee was really good, but not the packaged consumer version sold in the stores…

I’ll still say, Apple, with CCC, is still by far the easiest OS to clone to newer hardware. Once on target, the OS recognizes “all” hardware it will run on, and starts the right drivers.
A cloned Linux Desktop will often still be stuck with older drivers / resolutions, Sound often will not work right away, and Networking has often the MAC adresses of the previious NICs, resulting in not working LAN. Wireless on Linux is even worse…

Mac Mail, once installed, will work for the life of the hardware, and longer, often without ANY issue.
Even if the mail Server is MS Exchange, the Mac is often the mail client with the least issues.

Even as Groupware, the three involved Apps (Mail, Calendar and Addressbook) are often more seamless than MS All-In-One product Outlook - and over a longer time!

There are a (very) few cases, where I’ll install Thunderbird in Addition to Mac Mail on MacOS, but as said, there are very few use cases which require this…

My 2 cents
Andy

Andy_Wismer · January 19, 2023, 5:54pm

@pike
@sashaluda

Android and iOS are much more common than any PC workstation, true!

But how relevant is including exclusively single user systems in a discussion about user logins and profiles (Do note the intended plural!) ?

Both iOS and Android are almost exclusively single user devices - most of their whole lifetime. If anyone disagrees, send a screenshot how a user can log out, and another user can log in…

→ Not on a “rooted” iOS or Android system, I asked for users, not systemadmins, which root effectively is…!

Being a multitasking system doesn’t mean a system is multi-user capable!
Windows Workstations (and all MS servers except Terminal Service servers) being a very good example of a multitasking but single user system!

My 2 cents
Andy