By default, Samba as a Domain Controller with an LDAP backend needs to use the
Unix-style NSS subsystem to access user and group information. Due to the way
Unix stores user information in /etc/passwd and /etc/group this inevitably
leads to inefficiencies. One important question a user needs to know is the
list of groups he is member of. The plain Unix model involves a complete
enumeration of the file /etc/group and its NSS counterparts in LDAP. In this
particular case there often optimized functions are available in Unix, but for
other queries there is no optimized function available.
To make Samba scale well in large environments, the ldapsam:trusted=yes
option assumes that the complete user and group database that is relevant to
Samba is stored in LDAP with the standard posixAccount/posixGroup model, and
that the Samba auxiliary object classes are stored together with the the posix
data in the same LDAP object. If these assumptions are met,
ldapsam:trusted=yes can be activated and Samba can completely bypass the NSS
system to query user information. Optimized LDAP queries can speed up domain
logon and administration tasks a lot. Depending on the size of the LDAP
database a factor of 100 or more for common queries is easily achieved.
no