WindowsInteroperability

Revision 9 as of 2005-04-28 02:03:55

Clear message

Status

Introduction

Develop a strategy for improving out-of-the-box network interoperability with Microsoft Windows

Rationale

Scope and Use Cases

  • Simple and intuitive discovery of networked Windows print queues
  • Simple and intuitive discovery of networked Windows file shares
  • Simple and intuitive configuration for participation in a Windows authentication domain?
  • Formal plan to test these features

Implementation Plan

Data Preservation and Migration

Packages Affected

User Interface Requirements

Outstanding Issues

UDU BOF Agenda

  • What do Windows users expect?
  • Walk-through connecting an Ubuntu system to a Windows network
  • Create test cases

UDU Pre-Work

  • Arrange for a Microsoft Windows server system to use for testing/demo

Notes

Anyone here actually use Ubuntu in Windows networks.

CAn you describe any horrible experiences?

Alot of the stuff you can get to work, it just doesn't work out of the box. What's required?

Joiningan Ubuntu client to an AD domain. Also need to support legacy NT 4 domains, don't care about older than that (LAN Manager). Must care about plain shares from Win95/98.

Plain shares already just work.

More concerned about participating in domain structure, rather than plain files.

Do we care about "intuitive discover" of file / print shares.

Not just network neighbourhood, but Win XP will bounce around to find shared printers and networks, and add them to a list of discovered bits. Yuo'll see a friendly name for it immediately. Speeds things up a little bit, because SMP is slow because it's all broadcast. The con is that you're eating network broadcast bandwidth. Does this work with IPv6? Do we care?

As far as intuitivity of discovery, have you had trouble finding shared in Nautilus?

yes, it's frustratingly flanky sometimes, but haven't found a certain pattern in the failures/successes. Same physical / logical segment? Still occasionally flakey. Build in GUI tool (Right click, share folder) - totally flakey. What does this function actually do?

Windows itself has issues doing that also? It shouldn't unless it's misconfigured or is Windows XP home, or if you have simple file system sharing tuned on. Right, it sucks.

Do we havea GUI for sharing printers? Not that we're aware of. Setting up printer shares in smp.conf is a single line. Very low hanging fruit for someone who wants to do that. Check notes in PrintingRoadmap about sharing via samba / gnome that was broken at the last moment.

Probably the biggest one is getting participation in domains from a client side.

Server Side. Thom "I bleed for Servers".

Use cases:

  • Target out of the box out of control / kdc master for breezy? Probably not. Much easier with Samba 4.
  • Being a very very simple setup to be an NT 4 domain controller, which is currently non-trivial out of the box. Simple if you know how it's done, though. Should be able to make it easy.
  • Servers being members of domains, not different from clients being members of domain. Distributed authentications, w00t!
  • Secondary AD controllers not available until AD primary.
  • NT 4 domain slave is not a problem.

Wishlist features:

  • NT 4 domain takeovers, relatively simple, clients don't care what computer they're talking to. Just setup as secondary, turn off the primary, and promote self.

Any broader interopt stuff that people thought this BOF would be about?

What do we need to do to participate in an AD environment? Need kerberos for ticketing, and correct NSS magic. PAM destruction. =) Some for joining an NT domain. Serious PAM buggery.

Other concerns:

A bit of a distraction: How much discussion of setting up Samba LDAP and getting nice tools to manage that. From what tridge was saying, samba4 will have tools to make that easy. Really only targetting Samba3, other things have to wait.

3 still has lots of features that noone uses, because they're hideously difficult to configure.

MattOquist has a hacked up Perl script that deals with the configuration. Right now targetting to Fedora http://www.majen.net/smbldap

Netware support? Bugger off.

VPN clients for PPTP and L2TP (actually a subset of the IPSec spec). PPTP patches already in the kernel. pptp is easy to configure, but no GUI client. Server side is pretty trivial to setup. If it's supported in /etc/networking/interfaces, it's easy to add to the GUI, if not, but aj.

Shows up as a PPP interface.

It was a dark and stormy night....

Lots of half done clients. I'm keeping Jane amused. This is entertaining. It's sort of like flirting over IRC, except that she can't answer.

If you're running a VPN server on a W2K machine, 99% of machines allow the client to pick the protocol, most of the time PPTP support will cover the bases.

Do we actually have any good remote desktop software? rdesktop as a free software implementation works fine (shows up as tsclient). Citrix client up to 8.0 works fine too.

Mostly about network authentication.

From what Jane's seen, OOo is kind of like Excel but not quite - concern that MS tools don't read OOo formats.

Novell Linux Desktop (Ximian Desktop) defaults to saving in MS Office formats. Should we do that?

Concerns about automated / upgrading? We don't actually automatically upgrade in anyway.

Talking about people wnating their chat programs and such to be up and running all the time. Because the desktop function is fundamentally different, rather than installing applications that auto start, etc. we're generally safe.

System -> Logout "save current setup" needs a less sucky prompt.

Reading old email is all screwed up for style. (Rich Text)

Thunderbird can import, but not export.

Without NTFS write support, hard to share files.

Use case: Loading quickbooks in windows and then loading it in Linux and using the data in one location.

If you're running outlook and go to any website, it says that I can see all the people in your contact list are also in their