Samba3+LDAP - A "WHYTO"
So you want to use LDAP to store your SAMBA username and password information. For the uninitiated, it can be a daunting task. For the barely initiated, it can be daunting task, for the moderately initiated it can be a daunting task. There are many HOWTOs and Walkthroughs available throughout the internet. Many of them that I found started out very good but were left incomplete. Presumably the authors finally succeeded at their task and quit documenting. Other documents are distribution specific. Red Hat, Suse, Gentoo and many other distributions instruct their users to "get this package" and "install these dependencies". This may be fine and well for users of that particular distribution but for the users of other flavors of *nix, it leaves much to be desired.
My Linux distribution of choice, Slackware, is quite a bit different that the 'other guys'. Slackware aims to be simple to use, easy to follow, and stable. At first I struggled to understanding how Slackware could ever be considered "simple to use". There was a steep learning curve as I was forced to actually learn Linux rather than depend on someone else's GUI tool to do the job for me, but after some use I was pleasantly surprised to find how little I was having to fight to understand and follow what the system was doing. This 'ease of using and following Slackware' was driven home when I was required to use another distribution. I became very frustrated trying to fight the package manager and having to 'fake' the OS into installing what I wanted. It felt like using an OS from Redmond. I feel that automation is a poor substitute for understanding a process. Doing things by 'rhyme and rote' is something that I feel has no business in the Information Technology field.
The repercussions of using a Linux distribution that has been called "one step away from Linux from Scratch" is that many of the instructions on the web become less useful or even irrelevant. Step-by-step walkthroughs that do not explain the whys of a task can not be used. Other instructions use distribution specific tools to accomplish tasks which winds up hiding from the user the tasks that were performed. Official HOWTOs and man pages are great reference tools, but I have to admit that I can't understand them as quickly as I'd like.
I have struggled to put all of the pieces of this puzzle together. For those who don't think like manpages and for those who want a step by step breakdown of why each and every step is part of the process, I hope to shed some light on this in a fashion different than has been previously explained. Parts of these pages may be more verbose than you need and the same point may be made from several angles. I hope this helps everyone seeking the knowledge they need to be able to solve their own problem.
-- rtcg