Debian Squeeze, Active Directory & Samba

[Updated 30/10/2012 to include a configuration option to stop timeout errors]

This originally started as a note to myself should I ever need to revisit this, but I have expanded it a bit to make it a bit more general in case others might find it useful.

I use Debian Squeeze on our Linux servers. I have been trying to get them to authenticate off of our Active Directory/Windows Server 2008. Previously we used OpenLDAP and this worked well, but with AD I’d rather have one authentication system. One password rather than two.

My experience with Winbind has not been favourable. Despite documentation and plenty of blogs with well written examples of how to do it I could not get it to work for me. Most of what is written is from there.

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