D’oh – Running two instances of samba domain member servers messes up domain trust

Messed up our MSDFS root server as I started configuring the smb.conf for our Samba Domain Controller. We are running these as separate domain services on a virtual interfaces on the same box. When I added the Domain Controller to the Domain

net rpc join -S DOMAINPDC -W MYDOMAIN -s /etc/samba/pdc/smb.conf -U administrator.

However, because the private dir variable wasn’t set in either smb.conf, samba overwrote the secrets which was created when the msdfs root server joined the domain.

so, set that private directory option to keep all your records separate if you are running two samba servers on the same box.

This option is specific to Samba 3.0. Also, in the O’Reilly book Using Samba 2nd Ed, the option is referred to as private directory. The correct name for the parameter in 3.0 is private dir.