The file router container

The file router container serves two purposes:

  • Export NFS volumes
  • Interacting with Windows machines

Export NFS volumes

To export NFS volumes, configure the NFS exports file appropriately (see an example on copy/etc/exports.sample

Interacting with Windows machines

There are a few use cases here:

  • Interacting with services that are on Windows (For example, Illumina sequencers)
  • Exporting volumes to users

Warning

Integration of LDAP and Windows authentication is nothing short of a mess. There are plenty of alternatives on how to do it, but unless you really have to do it, you might want to consider avoiding it. There is plenty of documentation on the web, and we will not

If you want users to be able to mount your volumes as samba shares and have integrated LDAP authentication, we offer a ad-hoc script /usr/bin/change_password.py that does sync between samba and LDAP. It works this way:

  1. The user already has an account on LDAP
  2. You create an account for the user on Samba using pdbedit -a ldap_uid. Use smbpasswd ldap_uid, password will be boot
  3. The user logs in, ASAP, on the file_router and uses change_password.py boot to sync the passwords
  4. From now on the user can login on the file_router to change the password using change_password.py
(indeed password change can only happen on the file_router or the passwords will be out of sync)

Yes, this is ugly, but LDAP/Samba/Windows AD integration is ugly.

Note that for ad-hoc users (for example, in the bioinformatics case, interacting with a Illumina sequencer) you can just mantain a separate account just on samba without LDAP sync.