HP CIFS Server 3.0k Administrator's Guide version A.02.04

7 Winbind Support
This chapter describes the HP CIFS winbind feature and explains when to use it and how best
to configure its use. It contains the following topics:
• “Overview”
• “Winbind Features”
• “Winbind Process Flow”
• “Winbind Supports Non-blocking, Asynchronous Functionality”
• “When and How to Deploy Winbind”
• “Configuring HP CIFS Server with Winbind”
• “idmap Backend Support in Winbind”
• “Starting and Stopping Winbind”
• “An Example for File Ownership by Winbind Users”
Overview
HP CIFS Server must resolve the fact that HP-UX and Microsoft Windows use different
technologies to represent user and group identity. Winbind is a CIFS feature which is one of
several different ways in which CIFS can map the Windows implementation of user and group
security identifiers, SIDs, to the HP-UX implementation of user and group identifiers, UIDs and
GIDs. Further, there are several different ways to deploy winbind to achieve this mapping. The
purpose of winbind is to automate the creation of UIDs and GIDs and maintain their
correspondence to the appropriate Windows SIDs in order to minimize identity management
efforts.
Winbind is an important feature to understand before you configure HP CIFS Server because
choosing an appropriate configuration for your environment is the key to minimize IT
management problems. Choosing the best way to map identities for your environment is important
because directories and files populate file systems with permissions based on the identities of
the owners. Over time, the difficulty of changing user maps will increase unless the proper
configuration is chosen initially. This chapter will help you understand winbind and configure
CIFS appropriately.
NOTE: Winbind user mapping is only appropriate when the HP CIFS Server is a member server
of a Microsoft Windows domain.
For more information about winbind, refer to chapter 23, "Winbind:Use of Domain Accounts"
in the Samba 3.0 HOWTO Reference Guide at the following web site:
http://us3.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/
Winbind Features
Winbind provides the following features:
• Identity resolution via the Name Services Switch (NSS) (as configured in /etc/
nsswitch.conf)
The Name Service Switch (NSS) is an HP-UX feature which allows system information such
as host names, user names, and group names to be resolved from different sources.
Overview 109