[Dovecot] Slightly OT - Winbind and remote authentication.

[Timo Sirainen]

On 27.7.2012, at 20.01, Simon Brereton wrote:

> I was doing some research on setting up a samba server for my internal
> network (as an alternative to NAS).  The setup looks easy enough, but
> then I got to thinking - I already have an internet host with an mysql
> DB that has usernames and passwords and it would be simpler all round
> to reuse that as the authentication server.  That server is also
> running Dovecot, so I thought it might be simpler still to set up
> samba to authenticate using IMAP (the mysql server is not accessible
> on port 3306 anyway).  A quick google resulted in a suggestion from
> Robert (who by now must be on every single list I'm on or rather
> vice-versa) about using winbind.  I went off to the link he posted -
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/Authentication/Mechanisms/Winbind?highlight=%28winbind%29
> and the problem is that seems to indicate bind and dovecot are on the
> same server.

That link is about Dovecot authenticating via Samba, not vice versa.

> So, this not being the samba list notwithstanding, is it possible to
> use a remote dovecot host as an authentication back-end on a local
> samba installation?

No idea, but I think at least some Samba auth mechanisms probably want to have access to the plaintext password.