integration of samba pdc with ldap backend into kolab

[Jan Kowalsky]

Hi all,

since I was not very happy with the available possibilities for a simple
management of a samba pdc (not AD) I thought about to integrate such a
management feature into kolab / kolab-webadmin. There are of course some
ready made distributions like clearos, ucs or freeipa - but they are
heavy and do not fit all the time in an existing environment. But the
main point: they are mostly not integrated into a groupware. I tried the
ldap account manager - but in the open source version it doesn't go
together with kolab because it doesn't support groupofuniquenames.

So I did the following steps:

  * import the samba ldap schema into 389-ds (why isn't it by default?)
  * added a kolab user type with all the necessary samba attributes
  * configured the ldap aci for enable self writing of some attributes
  * did some simple changes in kolab webadmin for syncing samba
    passwords and getting samba domain configuration from
    kolab.conf

While I did the provisioning of the samba domain with the samba-ldap
tools, in the result we can now manage users and groups easily from the
kolab webadmin.

What do you think? Is it worth to share this in any howto? Do other
people still use samba pdc? Would it make sense to integrate this in the
kolab-webadmin code?

Best regards
Jan