Installing Samba Domain Controller

I'm trying to install the Samba DC and I'm really struggling to install it. I tried installing it on an actual PC, and after the installation, on the first boot, it started hanging trying to bring up something on /sdb. I'm not sure why it's trying to do that, because there IS no sdb on this machine. But it keeps waiting for 1:30 to sort of try again, at least twice, and then it just dies. So it won't boot that way. So then I tried putting it into a VM on a Linux box running VirtualBox. Now I've put a bunch of TK appliances on VirtualBox. But this one won't boot because it says it can't find an x86/amd processor, and that I need the i686 version to run it. Is there an i686 version of this? Is there something else I need for this? What do I do?

Replies (2)

Sorry for slow reply David

Reply 1 2025-04-28

I've been snowed under and neglecting the forums... :(

Our AD DC appliance does include a DNS server. It's the one integrated into Samba (i.e. the "SAMBA_INTERNAL" DNS). So if you point your PCs to the DC IP address for DNS, then it should "just work.

What our server doesn't provide is DHCP - so you will either need to manually configure the DNS IP in each PC. Or assuming you have a DHCP server already, you can configure that to point to the PCs to the DC server for DNS.

There has been some discussion of whether we should include a DHCP server on the TurnKey DC - or not. On face value I think it's a good idea, but the downside is that unless you are setting up a whole network from scratch there is often already a DHCP server on the network. Running more than one DHCP server on a network will cause weird things to happen. The DHCP servers will compete with one another - and only one will have the required DNS records. So either it won't work at all, or worse still (IMO) it will work intermittently and/or break randomly.

So with that in mind, I think a better solution would be to make a separate standalone DHCP (and DNS) appliance. But unfortunately, I just haven't had a chance to circle back to that idea...

Update and new question

Reply 2 2025-03-14

Turns out that I was able to fix the original issue by making some changes to the VirtualBox VM. There's much discussion about it as an issue, which can be found by searching for "VirtualBox 686 error"

This next part is more of a configuration question about this DC appliance. I've done the basic configuration, but there doesn't seem to be a DNS server integrated with the appliance, as there usually is with an actual Windows DC. So when I'm trying to join a computer to the domain, it can't find the domain to join. The instructions I was able to find here, seem to gloss over that point, with instructions on how to use samba-tool to create a zone, but... it doesn't really work, and I can't follow all the instructions because there's just no DNS entry for the server. It also seems like this only helps get the server set up as a BDC, as it were, not a PDC, which is what I'm really trying to do with it. I looked at the Samba Wiki page about this, but seems to distinguish between Samba servers provisioned using SAMBA_INTERNAL or not. I have no idea whether this was or not. And if not, it discusses how to install a BIND server. Do I need to add BIND to this thing to make it work, or have an otherwise-configured DNS server or something? What am I missing?