NT domain logins and some experimental administrative capabilities, have been added to a development branch of Samba, the publicly available file/print share program that makes UNIX servers look like Microsoft Windows. A Plug-in Authentication Module - PAM - has been written which allows Linux or Solaris workstations to authenticate against either an NT or a SAMBA Primary Domain Controller. Further work is needed, but the goal is to make UNIX systems look exactly like WindowsNT, from a network perspective. This will include full UNIX command-line administrative capability as well. The implications of this are that UNIX will be fully adminsterable by the standard NT server tools (e.g "user manager for domains"; "server manager for domains"), and workstations or servers (both UNIX and NT) will be fully administerable using HTML (cgi-bin wrappers around the smbclient program). Secured (SSL?) communication between the browser and the HTTP server is advised. Present status and further work needed At present, Samba and smbclient can only provide or obtain information using msrpc: no capability has been added to administer domain servers. This can (should) only be possible to do by administrators. Adding or changing SAM user accounts or domain groups is encrypted. The "backup domain controller" and "inter-domain trust relationships" also needs to be researched. Strategic aim The strategic aim is to ensure that the administration of "domain" systems (NT 4.0, NT 5.0, UNIX running Samba) can be done efficiently, easily and securely.

After obtaining a degree from Imperial College, London, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton worked Atari UK, CEDAR Audio Ltd and Pi Technology UK Ltd. Pi needed to replace PC-NFS when they upgraded to Windows '95, three years ago, and using SAMBA was the perfect solution. Since then I have been working on SAMBA as much as possible. The first task was to rework the Browsing and WINS capability. Recently, with Paul Ashton's invaluable help, we have added NT 3.5 and 4.0 Domain Logon support.