1. Introduction

In my last article, I covered the procedure for configuring Winbind to resolve Active Directory accounts in Debian. Though sufficient for a small network where users typically use only one workstation, this setup lacked some key features that are essential in an enterprise, and often heterogenous, network. Ideally, we want to automount home directories via NFS, we want ACLs to work in both Windows and Linux, and we want the same home directories to be used on both Windows and Linux workstations. Here we will setup a Linux file server responsible for hosting our users' home directories, and we will modify both our Winbind workstation and a Windows workstation to use this new file server.

The procedure described in this article was performed on a Debian-based system using a Windows Server 2003 domain controller. Therefore, some of the details in this article (package names, file locations, commands) mentioned here may be inconsistent with those of your distribution. Consult your system's documentation for these details.

If your enterprise network relies on trusted domains, you will need to replace the Winbind backend described in this article with an LDAP backend. See this section from the Samba-3 Howto for how to configure Winbind to use this backend.