[Kolab-devel] why not ship Kolab with Samba by default?

[Tomasz Chmielewski]

Martin Konold wrote:
> On Sunday 31 May 2009 02:23:42 Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
> 
> Hi Tomasz,
> 
>  > Was shipping Samba with Kolab by default ever considered?
> 
>  >
> 
>  > It would add great value to Kolab; right now, it's a bit painful to
> 
>  > configure both to work together.
> 
> Well, I considered it several times. I came to the conclusion that we 
> need a desperate use case within Kolab in order to justify the added 
> complexity and loss of scope (we target for Groupware mainly).

Now with multi-domain support (well, even without it), Kolab could 
target some Exchange installations.
There are dozens of groupware solutions; there is no direct Exchange 
equivalent which would be easy to configure.


> On the other hand I am more than willing to support an infrastructure 
> which makes it easier to integrate with Samba.
> 
> What was the biggest hurdle/pain when you tried to integrate Samba with 
> Kolab?

There are some problems involved with it:

* Kolab's web interface is not compatible with Samba (i.e. it doesn't 
add some required LDAP attributes for Samba) - so you have to use a 
different webgui for adding users: LAM (LDAP Account Manager)

* current LAM release needs php-hash extension, which is not available 
with Kolab; I have no idea how one adds custom PHP extensions to Kolab 
(or perhaps, OpenPKG). Which leaves me two choices:
   - don't use Apache shipped with Kolab, but the one shipped with the 
distribution
   - use an old LAM release, which doesn't need hash extension

* overall, such process is overly complicated; would be great if one 
could, during Kolab bootstrapping, just choose to add Samba domain 
controller, and everything would work flawlessly from scratch


BTW, I committed a Kolab-Samba integration HOWTO a few years ago - 
http://wpkg.org/kolab - now slightly outdated for Kolab 2.2.x.


-- 
Tomasz Chmielewski