Alieniloquent

So my employer’s network is a Windows network. This isn’t terribly unusual. Our department’s version control server, however, is a Linux box. We didn’t want to have to have more than one password, so back when I set it up, I took the time to figure out how to get it to authenticate to Active Directory for us. It’s really cool, actually. Samba is really awesome.

However, we have had a few problems. The thing is that every so often, our Linux server was being removed from the Windows domain. So then we couldn’t authenticate users, and so we couldn’t check out our source code. Obviously, that causes problems.

It turns out that adding one line to the [global] section of my smb.conf file is what is needed to solve the problem. See, the Windows boxes check in with the Active Directory controller once a day to update their machine ID. My server was not doing this. I’ve found, over time, that there are a lot of options for making Samba play well in a Windows network that aren’t really defaulted like they should be. Below is what I added to make it update like the others.

machine password timeout = 86400 # one day

Another interesting thing, was that despite my not telling it to, Samba was advertising the machine as a domain controller. So I had to add the line below to disable that (despite the docs saying I shouldn’t have to).

domain master = no

In addition to the rest of the configuration for Samba to work with Active Directory, and I think we may finally have it working all the way.