SUN CIFS update

It's been about two weeks since I last posted. I have written several things up in my head, but the better part of caution has kept me from posting until now.

As you can find out by looking back into past postings, we have been unable to join our SUN CIFS server to our campus/enterprise Active Directory for going on to 6 months now.

To do a sanity check, we decided to attempt a join to our own, test, Active Directory. That works just fine. So we can conclude that the problem lies in the enterprise configuration that we are trying to use.

Let's have a re-cap of the elements of this enterprise configuration, since I believe that many others may face this same environment. The AD we are working with is designed to allow distributed management to various units within the organization. It does this by using a hierarchical implementation which in general jargon is called an OU. So our structure is basically this: O=Corporate_name ---- OU=departments. To compare this to our local AD, we have no OU's and our hierarchy is just one level, the root: O=department.

So, SUN's CIFS server can join at the root level, but not at the OU level.

I did take a look at the various posting threads in SUN's CIFS-discuss list. Beside our trail of woe, I also found a trail of woe from Indiana University.

So, do we have any workarounds? Well, there are two possibilities that spring to mind. They both involve taking our existing, local AD and hooking it up to the enterprise AD. In one method, we can join up as a 'forest' member - but enterprise policies won't allow that. The other method is to set up a one way trust between our local AD and the enterprise AD. That is still under policy discussion, but should be ok since the trust is from us to them and not the other way around, we presumeably could not do anything 'bad' to compromize the enterprise.....

Whether any of these work arounds will actually work is yet to be determined.