Dear list members,
I hope amateur questions could be tolerated. I would make it professional if I could. I'm a newbie to OpenLDAP and probably even Linux, but I have to take care of an office network (Linux servers with Linux and PC workstations) that features email server, domain control, file/printer sharing, user account management, web servers and so forth, on my own without anyone's help.
Yesterday morning the power went down and so did our servers. After I turned the servers back on, the account information system was no longer working. Users weren't able to login with their credentials anymore, even the root. What I did was I logged in the server (the Samba PDC, LDAP server, Kerberos server, domain controller, email server) with single mode, reseted the root password, and added accounts for other individual users on the server. I know it was a bad idea. Although I got some things working (emails, file/printer sharing), but there are still other problems (PHP ldap_bind() from web servers fails, domain user accounts and profiles fail to load correctly).
I know there is a centralized mechanism that handles user accounts with the help of OpenLDAP, Kerberos, Samba, BerkeleyDB (and possibly other things), but I don't have a clue of how they work together. I've been trying to learn from docs and books for a long time before this power issue, but not very successful.
My greatest problem is that I don't know how these things are working together on my system. I believe I also lack some fundamental system knowledge. I've been reading the docs available, but they're so abstract to me and none of them seems to match our system configuration.
I'm hoping that I can get some help from here. Maybe some one can give me some suggestions on how to troubleshoot in such a scenario as a newbie, or an entry point that I can follow in order to explore the system. I believe you can tell that I'm totally confused here without being able to give much useful information about the problem and the system. I'm sorry for my ignorance, but I really tried to deal with it myself. If this thread turns out to be annoying or ridiculous, please ignore, and I do apologize.
However, while I'm still struggling on the problem, if anyone could help, I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
N.M.