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Comment by noinsight | Hacker News Reader

Do you mean for file sharing or as a directory server? File sharing I can definitely understand but I'm more skeptical about the directory server functionality.

Big companies have the resources to do many weird things but it would still strike me as odd to be running Samba DS in production.

How far along is the directory server these days in terms of stability and features?

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I actually did deploy a Samba-only AD domain for a warehouse at my current company (for which I was the sole IT tech at the time). Worked pretty reliably for our purposes, and now (a year-ish later) I'm prepping to expand that to the other warehouses.

Our uses for it ain't really all that significant, though; it's mostly for user management (and only for some things, like desktop logins, SMB shares, and our client VPN auth).

The AD-DC works pretty well these days, and has been adopted as a standard solution by a major European government (what helps is a local vendor committing to support the solution).

There are also some large cloud-based companies using it (and I mean other than the Amazon "Simple AD" solution that they never really promoted much - my suspicion was they did that to get a better price from Microsoft :-).

Hang out on the samba-technical@lists.samba.org list and you'll find around 70-80% of the questions are from Samba-AD-DC users - the fileserver is considered a somewhat solved problem these days.

Look at the email domains to get an idea of who is using it and for what.

Hmm what is the modern file sharing thing that we are supposed to use that is not Samba? if I wanted to share some directories on my LAN that can be browsed/read/written to by non-technical users without extra software what is the right thing to use these days?

Why are you not supposed to use Samba ? Samba works great as an SMB 2/3+ file server. Both Mac's and Windows use SMB3 as their native file sharing protocol, and Microsoft employ the cifsfs (SMB3+) linux kernel client maintainer.

It's just easier to keep using SMB3 :-).

Samba is working great for me. Several DCs, extended the schema for various different uses (storing TOTP seeds, Kopano mail attributes). Only thing that would make life easier is DFS-R for sysvol and WMI for 2012+ DCs. Used to be a nightmare but since about 4.3+ it's worked flawlessly.

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