Source
r/homelab•
Network-Fu

How many people run samba in their home labs?

I've recently started playing around with SAMBA 4 in my home lab and I've been impressed with it so far. It's definitely not a 1 to 1 Active Directory replacement but it has apparently come a long way from being a file and printer manager. I was wondering how many people were running it for single sign on in their home labs? Has anyone run in to any problems or down sides? Really just wanting people's opinions on it.

Posted Jan 21, 2016, 6:41 PM UTC

1827
macboost84•

I use Samba for file sharing, but not for logins. Although I prefer iSCSI when possible.

6
Network-FuOP•

Do you use a different SSO solution?

2
macboost84•

I use OpenLDAP

3
Network-FuOP•

That's next on my list of things to play around with.

2
macboost84•

I'm using OS X's OpenDirectory to manage LDAP. I just wish it was a little more full-featured and RELIABLE.

I just want to avoid licensing windows boxes at all costs.

3
spychipper•

Depending on your uses of LDAP you may or may not like this. I retired my long running setup in favor of FreeIPA last year, I could not be happier.

Disclaimer: I also have no windows clients which makes it a tiny bit easier.

2
macboost84•

I can't wait for the day I don't need at least one winblows install.

1
tbuskey•

As a unix admin, I've been using samba on top of nfs since 2.x and NIS, LDAP or local unix password + samba passwords.

If I had a large windows userbase, I hooked into AD for windows auth.

I'm curious about samba for authentication of windows and if it hooks into local unix or does the tdb thing.

Also, could a non enterprise windows client (home users) hook into it?

3
onenerdyguy•

samba on top of nfs? explain.

2
tbuskey•

Usually I run my fileserver and share folders out with NFS. I run Samba and also share them via that.

In the past at work, we had NetApps. They only did NFS at the time. All the Unix systems mounted them that way. On one system, we ran samba and shared the NFS mounted shares that way. Think of it as a proxy.

Later, Netapp came out with SMB. The license was $$$ and we had 3 Netapps. The samba proxy worked well for us and cost $0 so we never started up the Netapp native SMB. I'd later heard of issues with mixed SMB/NFS on Netapp. We never had an issue with samba.

This was in the NT 4.0 days. You lose ACL granularity from NTFS but NFS/Unix permissions were enough for us.

2
onenerdyguy•

Ah, ok. Now that makes sense, in a bit of a round a bout way.

1
bahwhateverr•

and if it hooks into local unix or does the tdb thing.

You can do it either way, and there are some other options too I believe. I'm no expert but I managed to fumble my way through it. I can access samba shares and ssh into my bsd box using my windows domain account.

One kinda cool thing is if you name your zfs snapshots a certain way they show up in the "Previous Versions" tab in windows when you bring up the properties on a folder.

1
Network-FuOP•

That's kind of the point I'm at. I've been fumbling around with it for a couple weeks now and it's been an interesting learning experience.

1
BeryJu•

Running a Multisite Samba Domain (4 DC's with Bind9 on Debian), also 2 fileservers with Samba.

1
Network-FuOP•

Have you run multi-site Active Directory implementations before? I'm kind of curious how it performs in comparison. I would imagine that it's not much different but I haven't gotten to DC replication yet.

1
BeryJu•

I have not run MS Active Directory at all infact. Replication is working fine for me, except for the fact that my Site-to-Site VPN is broken so both sites don't replicate. For SysVol I set it up so every DC rsync's it from the PDC every 15 Mins.

1
kamicc•

Only for loading Playstation 2 games... (OPL)

1
nznick•

Yep, using it in my home lab. Mainly to try out, and wrap my head around setting it up. Only issue I had was having a samba account, with same name as an account I use to log on to the linux boxes locally. Lesson here was use a local admin account on the linux boxes, that is not on active directory. I'm using it between 2x Windows instances, and 3x Linux instances, so small scale but works well.

1
Network-FuOP•

That's really why I started messing with it. Almost all architecture windows side is tied in to Active Directory in one way or another so I was looking for something to serve the same purpose in Linux. I'm still getting used to how things work in the *nix family so it's been a bit hit or miss on getting things running right the first time.

1
GreatSmellOfBRUT•

I just set up Samba on two VMs last week to act as domain controllers, and after a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, it actually went fairly well. The environment is mostly Linux with some one OS X and one Windows machine mixed in, and all can authenticate off of it. I also got home directories provided via NFS mount from our Synology NAS, as well as running a RADIUS server on a different VM.

Two gotchas:

  • Haven't quite gotten OS X to generate the same UIDs/GIDs as the Linux and Windows machines, so ownership isn't quite right yet.
  • Make sure you have avahi-daemon turned off - this caused me two days worth of ripping stuff out and toying with stuff because the DNS wouldn't resolve in Kerberos.

Verdict: So far, so great, but a couple of gotchas.

1
Network-FuOP•

Haha yeah that's a good tip. I don't have any OS X machines at home so I haven't run in to that issue but hopefully I'll remember it if I ever need to add a Mac to the mix.

1
blamethedevs•

I use Samba solely for the convinience (I know, I know.. "samba" and "convinience" in the same sentance, right?).

XBMC, Raspbmc etc all support Samba out of the box. Their support isn't even half bad. ES File Explorer for Android supports it, too. So does my Windows desktop and my Mac laptop. It just kinda...works. For most (all?) devices in my house.

NFS and iSCSI is much more versatile for storage, but not everything supports those protocols sadly.

1