SAMBA – Windows 7 Joining SAMBA 3 Domain

Samba 3 is still very popular and even though samba 4 is available it has not made its way in to enterprise Linux. Windows 7 looks for domains and assumes they all will be Active Directory based and searchable though DNS. Samba 3 still relies on the LanManagerService and announcements or WINS records

As XP falls out of support in 2014 more and more desktops will use Windows 7 or later and in this tutorial we show how you can add a Windows 7 SP1 desktop to your SAMBA 3 domain. It is easy and in the example you will see that it needs just two registry tweaks in Windows 7 to get you on your way

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetservicesLanmanWorkstationParameters]
"DomainCompatibilityMode"=dword:00000001
"DNSNameResolutionRequired"=dword:00000000

The above text can be saved as a .reg file and imported into your registry if you wish. You can see from the registry path that we altering the LanManWorkstation parameters and turning on Domain Compatibility and turning off the requirement for DNS resolution. The worksation will need to resolve the name of the domain by

• Broadcast
• WINS
• LMHOSTS entry

The video shows setting up the PDC on SAMBA using YaST and joining the workstation to the domain.