Bill Antonia
Beacon Community College
Just a note to say hello and say how we use
Linux
We currently use 4 Linux machines, one for proxy
internet access, one as a router (firewall!) between our curriculum and
administration networks and two to provide inter subnet communications
through the use of samba. Both networks use NT servers to control the individual
domains however this means a user would have to log on once for the home domain
and then repeatedly for each share connected to on the remote domain. To get
around this I use samba and smbmounts.
1. Set samba to do server security on the password
NT server within its domain and make that Linux box as a part of that
domain.
2. Make sure all your users are added to the user
list on Linux box. You could set their passwords to * in /etc/shadow so the
cannot telnet.
3. Create a directory on the Linux box which you
wish your users to connect. This directory can be left empty!
4. Make sure that the directory created is shared
through samba.
5. Use smbmount to connect to the other domain
using a high enough user/password to give your users access to the other
domain.
SuSE 6.1 had a bit of bother at this point unless
you had used a patch or had recompiled the kernel.
SuSE 6.3 has no problems!
mount the remote share using
smbmount //remoteservername/sharename /mountpoint -U
username%password
A nice thing about this is you can decide which
machines can connect to the samba server if those machines use fixed IP
addresses. Note that all the users take on the user identity of the connection
to the remote domain and also their security. One way to restrict the connection
is to change the access rights of the users on each share within
samba.
6. Finally place appropriate NET USE commands in
your login scripts to the samba server within your domain. And hey presto you
connect directly to the shares on the remote domain when you log
in.
This is one way, to enable connection in the
reverse, set up another samba server in the remote domain pointing back. You
only need to use one network card in each machine but it probably would enhance
performance if they bridged the two subnets, this has not been
tested.
You can even create home directories on the Linux
box which dynamically connects to the remote home directory of that user by
using the preexec option to smbmount the remote home share and postexec to
unmount the remote share.
Hope anybody finds this of use
Bill