[wplug] w2k samba clients Solved!!

[Bill Moran]

John Harrold <jmh17 at pitt.edu> wrote:

> Sometime in August Bill Moran assaulted the keyboard and produced:
> 
> | Are these "XP" machines XP Pro, or XP Home?
> | 
> | XP Home doesn't really "do" networking, it just sort of pretends to, so
> | if you're using XP Home, you probably never really joined the domain.
> 
> That would make sense here. Our XP machine is XP Pro, and I'm pretty sure
> that I had to enter root's samba username and password in order to join the
> domain. From the Joining the domain" section in the HOWTO:
> 
> http://us1.samba.org/samba/ftp/docs/htmldocs/samba-pdc-howto.html#AEN126
> 
> It appears that for "Windows NT" you don't have to enter the root password,
> but for "Windows 2000" you do. Is Windows XP Home more like "Windows NT"
> and  Windows XP Pro more like "Windows 2000"? 

That's a pretty rough analogy.  Fact is, NT is old stuff at this point,
and there is a lot more stuff that W2K and XP Pro do that NT didn't.  On
the flip side, XP Home is intentionally crippled so that it can't fully
function in a business environment.  I think some of this has to do with
AD, which didn't even exist at the time NT was produced.

> This would make sense. We have people here who accesss their home
> directories on our Samba server without actually being part of the domain
> -- they bring in their laptops and I don't actually create a user account
> for each laptop. So they would have access to the resources of the Samba
> server (via their username and password), but the machine isn't actually a
> member of the domain.

It can be made to work.  If you have strict security on Samba, it won't
talk to machines that aren't part of the domain, but that's usually not
very practical, for exactly the reason you state.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com