Monday, March 22, 2010

Trying Samba4

It's been a while since my last post. I'm still alive and running (Open)Solaris whenever I have the option to choose.
A lot of exciting things happened in the past months and now a new challenge arises.
We start a new research branch and I got to plan (and soon to install) most of the infrastructure. It involves quite a lot of things that are pretty exciting by themselves (SamFs, VDI, xVM/Xen).
The one thing that kept me interested the past few days was the integration of the planned Windows7 guest for the virtual desktop infrastructure. As I try to avoid too much contact with the M$ world I am looking for a way to do it utilizing Unix power. As Microsoft removed support for NT4 style domains and group policies that became quite a challenge. Right now I'm trying out Samba4 as Active Directory replacement. So far it looks rather promising. A few questions arose already but with the help of the folks on #samba-technical those were cleared quite easily.
As I want to do some fancy stuff (like the shadow volume/previous version stuff in combination with zfs snapshots) it will become a hybrid setup with Samba4 as AD DC and Samba3 doing the fileserver part.
I tried to join the OpenSolaris CIFS service to the Samba4 domain but failed so far (that's being investigated by the samba folks). But since the storage server is going to be Solaris10 anyway that isn't a top priority at the moment.

I'll post more when I do the interesting parts of the planned installation.