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How do I connect an external Samba box to a Mac OS X Server running Open Directory (LDAP)?

Samba v3 is running on Red Hat. I have SWAT setup and users can access the directory but there's no authentication yet. I want to connect it to our Mac OS X server running Open Directory, so that it has an LDAP backend. That way all authentication will be done on our LDAP server rather than the Samba box. All the informaton and documentation I've poured through have been for WinXP boxes and Active Directory setup. The documentation for Samba on Apple's website was for running Samba on the server itself rather than on an external box. I've played around the with the smb.conf file, setting various options and messing with the LDAP lines but I would like to know exactly how to set this up.

Public Comments

1. http://us3.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/passdb.html#id2563659 open directory uses openldap. the samba ldap is designed to interface with openldap and includes a schema in the correct format. read the samba doc carefully, there are a lot of little gotchas and dependencies. also, you should have some utilites available on your linux box to help test and isolate. ldapsearch for instance. use ldapsearch with basic queries to ensure that you can bind to your mac and retrive data. this will help you to ensure that you are using valid credentials (if anonymous searches are not enabled), etc. look at the man page for ldapsearch, ldapmodify, etc. these utilities are from openldap also.