Samba, Active Directory

This is a quick tutorial explaining how to interact with a Windows Active Directory server. The main goal here was to mount directories on the Windows server.

The official reference on the Gentoo wiki has a lot more information.

Prerequisites

• You need to have Samba installed with the kerberos USE flag.
• Edit the files /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf correctly.
• VERY important: Add the Windows PDC (Primary Domain Controller) as a DNS server. Else you won't be able to join the Windows domain!

Creating the ticket, joining the domain

• You must first create the ticket with the kinit command. This seems to create an authentication ticket that is valid for a period of time (one day or such).
• After that, you must join the domain, which means that the server knows that your machine is authorized to be present on the domain. This is accomplished via the command:

net ads join -U elvanor

Operations

• Once this is done, you can start working with the Windows service. The only thing I have done so far is mounting shares, via the smbmount command. This is fairly easy.