Reply to post:

Samba settings SNAFU lets any user change admin passwords

wallyhall

> "My coffee is cold" - "it's because of linux"

Precisely.

I'm a part-time, voluntary sysadmin for a non-profit organisation, and I've been extremely relaxed about password policies and giving people the freedom to choose their desktop software etc.

Yet despite trying to make their lives easier at the cost of making life significantly harder as the *system administrator*, only but a few people come at problems with the expectation that it might *not* be "because we're using a network" or "Windows Professional is on a domain, Windows Home never does this" or "That Linux stuff you run it all on".

Due to budget constraints, we run Samba 4 for AD controllers and fileservers. It's extremely stable, although nowhere near as feature rich as Windows Server. But it works. And it's sufficiently compatible with Microsoft's workstation offering that I can minimise the time and energy I spend enabling people to do their jobs while giving them much of the flexibility they're used to enjoying at home.

In regards to it being "Enterprise" or not, I can't comment from that context. I consider it an absolutely legitimate production scenario - I apply change control and monitoring to it, and people are prevented from doing their jobs if it's unavailable. Today I had to patch it. We run "Enterprise" Cisco equipment we sourced second-hand off of Ebay, for which we get no support from Cisco, and we run second-hand Dell and HP workstations and server hardware which again - we get no support for.

But it works. And it's been happily running as a production solution serving multiple users for a very long time.

On an aside, my University's comp.sci department ran Samba. The rest of the University used Windows Server. I can remember a day during a C++ lab session that various file shares became unavailable and the lecturer called in assistance. Three guys came in, two in jeans and with long hair - the other with a suit and tie. The two hippy-looking jean wearers sat down and opened multiple SSH sessions and started muttering about "distributed filesystem permissions" and "ReiserFS rollout". My lecturer watched on. "What's the issue lads?" he asked. "Oh permission changes rolled out across the Windows fileservers, we didn't get notified in advance so the our Unix mirrors have fallen out of sync." The lecturer then asked, observing the guy in a suit standing behind them (now looking somewhat awkward and out of place): "Who are you then?". "Oh I'm the Windows guy."

Production system. Big university network. Enterprise grade? Who knows. But they deemed it good enough for the comp.sci department's needs. :-)

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon