In summary, the applications that are going to enable us to authenticate with a 

Windows domain are Samba, Kerberos, and winbind.

4.2.3  File sharing using domain shares

Since the Linux clients are joining a domain and the majority of clients in the 

domain will probably still be Windows clients, the best way to share files is 

through Windows shares.

Mounting shares on a Linux client using 

smbmount

 gives the user file systems on 

the Linux client, which behave very much like any other file system. However, if 

the share is not open for everybody, a user name/password combination is 

needed, just like under Windows. When mounting a share by hand this can be 

input without problem. However, this might lead to several problems:

Manually mounting shares using the 

smbmount

 command may not be an 

acceptable practice for all users. Users are not used to having to mount 

shares manually because under Windows this is done automatically when 

logging on.

A way must be found to enable automatic mounting on login just like on 

Windows. In Linux, automatic mounting of SMB shares can be accomplished 

using entries in the /etc/fstab file.

A simple solution would be to mount shares in a logon profile. However, this 

needs a password, and the user is used to shares being mounted using the 

password supplied upon logon. 

A Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) exists to enable automatic mounting 

at logon, called pam_mount. Since this module is not completely mature yet, 

care has to be taken to include this in the planning. Currently it is the only useful 

way to incorporate some sort of single sign on like under Windows.

When planning for this, extra time should be included to test the pam_mount 

module on the Linux client chosen for the project. When it works it is a very 

powerful method of mounting shares automatically.

Planning tip:

 Test and plan use of pam_mount extensively.

Home directories and shares

During planning it might be very tempting to push user home directories on Linux 

clients to Windows shares. This will enable a  thinner  client.

48 

Linux Client Migration Cookbook   A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop Linux