Canonical Question about Samba's NT Domain migration with rename to Samba's Active Directory

Question

I've spend literally years researching this topic, I was thinking about documenting it somehow. There's a lot of myths and incomplete information around the Web. I'd like to document a way to perform such migration with rename and troubleshooting as well as how to fight back with Microsoft to preserve old Classic NT compatibility even with the newest Windows 10 v1803 - yep, it's still possible but with some efforts like; Windows' settings hacking, performance and security trade-offs. That's why the need to move on. I am not sure whether Serverfault is a good place for this, therefore the question, although I've seen recently something similar:

Borderlines for GDPR related questions

Can you help me with my GDPR issue?

I am pretty sure, that I won't be able to complete the answer and the question right away, but instead it may take me about half a year to complete it in my production environment and describe it here. It's going to be a long post... What do you think? Maybe does someone care to join or offer grammatical support? :)

Answer 1

A canonical question is fine, but a couple comments:

• It's not clear to me what you're proposing to write about. Your title and some of the post make it sound like you're talking about migrating from a Samba NT domain to a Samba AD domain, but you also mention preserving NT compatibility in Win10 clients. So it's not clear if you mean migrating from Samba 3 to a Samba 4 AD domain, or running Samba 4 for non-AD clients or what.

• If it's going to take half-a-year to write this, how much is going to change in the meantime. Samba 4 is a very active project, with lots of new enhancements coming all the time.

• As much as I trust ServerFault, when I was working with Samba 4 I learned that the most reliable (and almost the only truly trustworthy) source of information was the Samba.org documentation. There were (and, I assume, still are) lots of "how to set up Samba" tutorials on the web, and most of them were flawed - either not up-to-date, or with subtle errors, or with not-so-subtle errors.

At the very least, anything posted here should have references to the official Samba documentation to back up any recommendations.