HP CIFS Server 3.0b Administrator's Guide version A.02.01.01

Winbind Support

Overview

Chapter 7 161

Overview

UNIX and Microsoft Windows NT have different models to represent

user and group information and use different technologies for

implementing them. Winbind is a component of the Samba suite of

programs that resolve Windows users and groups to HP-UX UIDs and

GIDs. Winbind uses a UNIX implementation and the Name Services

Switch (NSS) to allow Windows NT domain users to appear and operate

as UNIX users on a HP-UX system. Winbind stores the ID mappings

database in a tdb ﬁle or a LDAP directory.

Winbind provides the following two features:

• Identity resolution via Name Service Switch (NSS)

The Name Service Switch (NSS) is a feature which allows system

information such as hostname, user names, group names to be

resolved from different sources.

The NSS application programming interface allows winbind to

present itself as a source of system information when resolving

HP-UX user names and groups. Winbind uses NSS interfce to

enumerate the users and groups on a HP-UX machine running

winbind and see all users and groups in a Windows domain.

Winbind provides the NSS routine, /etc/lib/libnss_winbind.1,

which interfaces to the winbind daemon to resolve ID mappings.

• User and group ID allocation

Winbind maintains a database called winbind_idmap.tdb where it

stores mapping data between HP-UX UIDs/GIDs and Windows SIDs

(Security Identiﬁers). It stores the UID and GID allocated from

idmap uid/gid range that it has mapped to the Windows SID. If the

idmap backend has been speciﬁed as ldapsam:ldap://<ldap

server name>, then winbind obtains this information from the

LDAP directory server instead of using a local mapping ﬁle.

For more information about winbind, refer to chapter 20, “Winbind:Use

of Domain Accounts” in the Samba 3.0 HOWTO Reference Guide.