Caponato's Notebook

You have installed a fresh Debian 12 Bookworm system without a graphical interface. To access the system, only ssh is required. I prefer running Samba servers in a KVM environment. Further instructions on how to prepare a KVM domain (virtual machine) can be found here.

It is recommended that you upload your ssh certificates from another machine if you wish to access this system easily without a password through ssh.

For illustration purposes, this installation refers to a machine named “server” in the mad.caponato.es domain (DNS domain name), with MAD.CAPONATO.ES as the Kerberos realm name. The address is 192.168.0.13.

• Do not use a domain as your AD name. Use a subdomain like in this example.

• Your subdomain should not be resolvable from the internet. Use it only internally for your AD.

• Do not use .local for the TLD, this is used by Avahi.

• If you are planning on building a small home AD, consider using home.arpa.

• If this is going to be an AD Domain Controller, use a name like DC1 instead of “server”.

• If this machine will be configured as a file server, use something like FS1 instead of “server”.

• Install some useful tools

apt-get install net-tools rsync

• Make yourself a favour

echo "alias ll='ls -lash'" >> ~/.bashrc

• Your /etc/hosts file should look like this:

127.0.0.1	localhost
192.168.0.13	server.mad.caponato.es server

• Set your hostname

hostnamectl set-hostname server

• Configure a fixed IP address. Edit /etc/network/interfaces (your physical interface - ens3 - may be different):

Modern distributions use a “predictable name” scheme. Your network card names are important. See this example :

echo /sys/class/net/*
/sys/class/net/ens3 /sys/class/net/lo

Write down your interface name. It will be used later configuring Samba. If this machine has more than one interface decide if you will use one or more of them. In this guide only one interface is used.

# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug ens3
iface ens3 inet static
address 192.168.0.13
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1

  
sed -i -e 's/# en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8/' /etc/locale.gen
dpkg-reconfigure --frontend=noninteractive locales
update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
update-locale LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
update-locale LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
  
  

These are not necessary, but I prefer to have these settings:

echo "vm.swappiness=10" >> /etc/sysctl.conf

apt-get install rsyslog
rm /var/log/journal -Rf
reboot

Edit /etc/default/grub and add:

If you want to disable IPV6: (see also edit of /etc/systcl.conf at the end)

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="ipv6.disable=1"

While I'm here, I like my KVMs starting quicker, so also use:

GRUB_TIMEOUT=1

If you are using KVM as you should for most things samba, activate serial console:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet console=ttyS0"

('quiet' is already there, just add console parameters. If you want kernel output while booting, remove 'quiet'). Save changes and update grub

update-grub

# Disabling IPv6
net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1

Reboot

reboot

• Continue to install Samba as a Domain Controller (provision a new AD, or add an additional DC).

• Or else install Samba as a member server (file server or print server).

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