Back in line, maggot!

Just spent about 8 of the last 13 hours con­vert­ing an NT4 domain to a Samba3 domain using LDAP as a SAM back­end (to store machine and user accounts). It would’ve been much sim­pler if not for a bug in smbldap-tools (which didn’t add the “sam­baSamAc­count” object­Class to the machine accounts, in turn break­ing the net rpc vam­pire process). Part of the issue is that there’s so lit­tle in the way of google-able doc­u­men­ta­tion, if some­thing breaks and you aren’t already very famil­iar with the way NT4 domains han­dle machine accounts and/or how Samba does the PDC dance, it gets ugly fast.

Some other quirks (like machines con­sis­tently not join­ing the domain the first time, but prop­erly join­ing the sec­ond time [??]) kinda suck, but hope­fully they’ll get ironed out in time for Samba-4, when they get to throw every­thing out and enter the 9^th cir­cle of ActiveDirectory Hell. Microsoft’s “Roaming Profiles” 5uXX0r as well, tak­ing about 40-seconds the first time you login to a machine, and another minute the first time you log out. I won­der what it could pos­si­bly be doing for that 40 – 60 sec­onds, per­son­ally — since the files them­selves are only 16M, it’s look­ing like either Samba is really slow (unlikely), or there’s some kind of ugly time­out going on. Junk to inves­ti­gate tonight, I guess.

I also got a Trek 7100 “hybrid” (granny/commuter) bike yes­ter­day. It’s light enough for my lazy self to drag up the stairs to my apart­ment, though I haven’t rid­den since I was a kid. I’ve already wiped out once (thanks to a freshly trimmed rut along­side a side­walk), and my legs were get­ting a lit­tle heated by the end of the trip home after work (which is evi­dence more of my total out-of-shapeness than the bike).

Anyhow, hav­ing been awake for so long and then wast­ing so many hours wrestling with my three favorite tech­nolo­gies (NT domains, LDAP, and Samba), I will now sleep until tonight… Or until I get called in to the office because my boss used a non-standard pass­word for the big-boss’ computer’s local-admin account, pre­vent­ing me from get­ting it back on the domain. Whichever comes first…