[OpenIndiana-discuss] Joining an Active Directory Domain with smbadm

[James Carlson]

On 01/03/13 11:13, Peter Tripp wrote:
> This is just to follow up, I finally busted out Wireshark to catch the DNS request it was making and it became abundantly clear what was causing my 'err=61' condition, it was an nsswitch.conf issue. smbadm was looking for ad1.univ.edu instead of ad1.dept.univ.edu.
> 
> nsswitch domain: dept.univ.edu
> nsswitch search domain: univ.edu
> ad domain: dept.univ.edu
> ad controller: ad1.dept.univ.edu

nsswitch.conf doesn't have domains or specify anything about DNS
internal operation, but resolv.conf does.  I suspect you might mean the
latter.

> The following DNS query would fail: ad1.univ.edu
> 
> Although it would properly look up the domain controller based on my DNS records, it would truncate to the domain component (ad1) and the add that to my search domain (univ.edu) instead of just using the SRV record unmolested (ad1.dept.univ.edu). So if you run into err 61 when using smbadm, check and make sure both your domain and your search domain match the AD domain you're trying to join.

As the resolv.conf(4) man page says:

     The domain and search keywords are  mutually  exclusive.  If
     more  than  one  instance  of these keywords is present, the
     last instance takes precedence.

In other words, if you specify one, you probably should not be
specifying the other.

(Historically, there was a reason to specify both, but it was pretty
narrow.  If you ran software using ancient resolvers that didn't
understand the "search" keyword, and if you had two or more items in the
search list, then a plausible work-around would be to specify 'domain'
first just for those old resolvers, and then a full 'search' list
[always including the specified 'domain' as well] for the newer ones.
Of course, I don't think you'll encounter such software on OpenIndiana,
so the point is moot.  Just say "search" and be done with it.)

-- 
James Carlson         42.703N 71.076W         <carlsonj at workingcode.com>