[K12OSN] Eureka! Woo-Hoo! It works!

[David Trask]

YaaaaaaaaaaaHooooooooooo!

That was the sound emanating from a remote corner of the VCS library where
I was sitting at a test machine (Windows XP) joining the machine to the
domain and then successfully logging on thereby retreiving a roaming
profile.  

Now why is this so exciting?  After all joining a domain and so forth is
no big deal.  However, it is if you are doing it for the first time with
cutting (bleeding) edge stuff.  Up until now I've been running Samba 2.27a
on RedHat 9.  I've wanted to upgrade to Samba 3 for quite some time, but
the change from 2.2x to 3.0.x has been similar to the change from Jaguar
to Panther in the Mac OS X world.  It had changed just enough to
completely screw up nearly everything I had developed (documented) up to
then.  In case you're wondering...the cool thing about Samba/LDAP is
centralized authentication for all platforms....my users all have one
username and home directory regardless of what machine, subnet, or
platform.

After wiping my test server nearly 20 times (I screw up a lot) I finally
got it to work.  I had gotten very close, but no cigar....and then
today....a breakthrough!  I finally figured out the monumentally stupid
mistake I kept repeating over and over.  The good news?  I now have a
Samba 3 /LDAP server working on Fedora Core 2 (essentially RedHat 11)
using Samba 3.03-5.  I was so excited I started dancing around the room
while astonished 7th graders looked on (and eventually joined in).  I even
high-fived the librarian.  The self-induced time sucking vortex that I was
going to deal with this summer has suddenly become strangely quiet.  I see
a few weeks of vacation coming into focus.  I see servers being completely
redone and readied for the fall within days of school ending next
Wednesday.  This is so very cool!  Now I'm going to document it and make
copies of my configs to share with the folks at the Gould Linux Seminar in
two weeks!

David N. Trask
Technology Teacher/Coordinator
Vassalboro Community School
dtrask at vcs.u52.k12.me.us
(207)923-3100