Jason S. Wagner

My Personal Homepage

Tag Archives: Linux

WIP: SAMBA Active Directory Domain Controller on Arch Linux

May 6th, 2013

(update at end of post)

Last night, I decided to take a stab at setting up a SAMBA4-based Active Directory Domain Controller.  I first tried this on the newly released Debian 7.0, but quickly noticed it was still shipping a pre-4.0 beta.

Realizing I was probably going to have trouble finding a current version, I took off the training wheels and pulled a basic Arch Linux appliance into VirtualBox.  To my surprise, almost all the content on the Arch wiki for SAMBA still relates to 3.x versions, or is limited to just “how to set up CIFS shares”.

Provisioning a SAMBA-based domain controller is simple enough, but Arch’s packagers have removed the startup scripts, preventing you from running the software (this doesn’t affect file shares, of course; that would have been noticed immediately).  After voting on the bug, I manually worked around the issue by pulling the original configuration files from SAMBA’s tarball.  I now appear to have the software running, but hit another roadblock in the final stretch.

AD or Kerberos or whatever (I don’t even have it installed yet, give me a break) requires signed time responses from the local NTP daemon, but Arch’s NTP package is compiled without that feature.  I quickly stole the package’s build file and add the option and compiled the daemon for myself.  The wiki says I shouldn’t submit it to the AUR, instead, that I should file a bug against the already existing package.  So, I’ve done that.

I’ve been documenting the whole process, using the official HOWTO as a guide, and will publish it to the Arch wiki once I have actually completed and tested the installation.

Update: The bugs were resolved overnight.  Let me restate that — I encountered two small bugs.   One had already been reported, so I simply left a comment on it.  The other, I had to file myself.  While I slept, all necessary changes were committed, new packages were published, and the things I couldn’t do last night are now no longer problems.  Even though these were “small” things, I wonder how long it would have taken to resolve the same issue in Debian or Ubuntu.  Many thanks to the Arch Linux package maintainers!

Ringtails and Routines

December 13th, 2012

I’m waiting for an Ubuntu 13.04 daily build VM to install, so I thought I’d get around to drafting a new post.

I’m stuck in a rut.

My last post here showed an effort to move to Linux.  It usually starts with an exciting new Ubuntu release, and usually ends with me micromanaging configuration files in some completely different distribution, wondering how I ended up there.  The reasons for stepping away from the smoking pile tend to shift from “well, I needed X and couldn’t find X or Y-like X replacement” to “I appreciate that this exists but I don’t have the time to tweak this into submission” to “Well, it just stopped”.  Fatigue can vary, but the result has always been failure, and I’m pretty sure nobody is surprised by that turn.

My current issues are these:

Arch is fantastic, but I’m pretty sure my installation will completely ruin itself and I will need to spend three hours figuring out how to conform to some unexpected upstream change because nobody on the Arch team pauses to think, “maybe actively breaking machines without warning could be prevented” instead of blaming users for not researching each package upgrade before applying it (I love you, Arch, but you must know that this is ridiculous).

GNOME is fantastic, but both the open and proprietary drivers are garbage, aggravated by adding a secondary display.

I tire of this.  I want to move in full time.  How am I going to get this done?

I suppose the solution will be to build a new system that utilizes the integrated Intel video solution (HD 4000, right?), and move completely into that.

I hate the idea of throwing away this almost four year old machine that has served me well, but I think it’s time to move on.  After the holidays, I will start pinching pennies and get myself a great little Linux machine as my primary desktop.  I’ll hang onto my current desktop as a “heavy” machine, for Windows gaming and tasks like audio and video editing, where I will have both the tools that I’m comfortable with and the power to push it.

Well, the install is done, back to my rut.