Method for transferring NT user list and attribute to linux.

[Sebastian]

A mouth full the title. But that's the question.

A friend of mine is changing his farther's company from NT to linux. ( yahooo!)

Anyhow he needs to make the transistion as easy for the users as possible. That means no making everyone lose their current mail and no making everyone go and redo their password and such.

So he needs either to get a utility to move the user list and such. Or to use the NT box as a authantication server. I see that LDAP and such does this quite well. And there might even be a NIS server for NT (god knows why...). But i don't know if these allow SMTP and POP to work and whether the users can recive their mail alright. He's expecting only POP mail and a few samba shares. So anyhow that's the clux of the problem.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Rogue]

Should be able to use Samba and just sychronize the entire domain using your current NT based PDC. Then take current PDC offline and promote Samba machine to the new PDC. Of course, I work only with NT domain and have never touched Samba. But, this is how I would promote an NT BDC to an NT PDC. Can anyone else help this fella out who has experience with Linux/Samba?

 

[Damaged]

Sorry my experience with SAMBA is a bit more simple than that. And I have like ZERO experience with NT domains. I'm pretty sure this is covered in SAMS book on SAMBA though. Just go to your nearest book store and "browse" through it. Shouldn't be a problem.

 

[Sebastian]

Could be an answer there. But the problem is i don't know how linux will react to it. The most pressing issue is that the mail (pop and smtp) has to work.

 

[rahvin]

You can setup samba to use the NT box as a primary domain authorization server. As far as moving email boxes over, it's doubtfull he would need to really go in and make a user for each user on the NT domain and they would automatically have the email pop account. I don't really know a way to move email messages from NT over to Linux though.

 

[Rogue]

If you are using Exchange, you should be able to export the entire user list into a .txt file, edit it for scripting purposes and then script it into Linux. That is the best way I can think of doing it with the least amount of work (ie.-entering everyone in by hand).

 

[Sebastian]

They need the passwords as well... that's one big ouch.

 

[rahvin]

Because of security I doubt you can export password lists or even import them into linux. The best bet is to look through the samba documentation and see if you can use the NT box as a domain server only and let it pass trusted keys to the linux box that allows service usage. I have a feeling that if you do this though that you are opening the linux and NT system up with some massive security holes (samba isn't very secure). I wouldn't really recommend this without some in depth security auditing if this network is connected to the internet.

 

[Sebastian]

It is.. it's just firewalled to hell as well. nothing works except port 80, 110 and 25.

 

[Damaged]

Yeah, the passwords will be a problem as the encryption schemes are different. You could put a sniffer on the NT box though and sniff most of them out, then script in the user/pass to the Linux box though.

 

[Sebastian]

My friend is not that able...