Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov … mammoth cave …

Finally Samba has released a preview of the next generation of their software. It has many interesting stuff starting from Active Directory-like working environment with its own small LDAP and Kerberos server included. Integrated SWAT (web-based administration interface to Samba) and many more. Even a one-click migration from Windows 2003 AD-based PDC to samba with all the machines/users and other stuff.

I am waiting for the stable release a lot, since I really like this topic and spend a lot of time around it. So far I have a couple of places where Samba (3) is acting as PDC for Win XP clients and I am happy, but there are some limitations and uncomfortabilities which I hope will be solved in the 4th branch of Samba.

I have seen many companies which try to track all IT fixed assets and do a huge (from my point of view) mistake when on each IT asset a label (with some number as a serial number) is set. Such labels are a headache since they usually get lost (fall away) and it is impossible to tell something from this label without contacting accounts department which usually do not know much of a particular asset.

From my view, IT assets should be tracked by Vendor + Vendor serial number (each vendor of hardware equipment puts its own serial numbers). This solves a big number of problems starting from that labels with SN from vendors are very well fixed and it is almost impossible to loose them. Second is that accounts do not need to generate some new ID numbers all the time and finally, you can get a lot of information from the serial number of the particular vendor in most of the cases including the type of the equipment, when it was produced and so on.