Samba AD DC Lab (Ubuntu 24.04)

This lab provisions a Samba Active Directory Domain Controller on Ubuntu 24.04 using Samba internal DNS.

Example lab values used here:

• Hostname: dc1.test.local
• IP: 10.0.0.252/24
• Realm: TEST.LOCAL
• NetBIOS domain: TEST

Note: Using .local can be problematic in mixed networks (mDNS). For real deployments prefer corp.internal or a subdomain you control.

Quick start

On a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 server (clean VM/box):

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y git

git clone https://github.com/yossefseit/samba-ad-dc-lab.git cd samba-ad-dc-lab

Create your local config (NOT committed)

cp scripts/00-env.example scripts/00-env nano scripts/00-env

(Optional) make scripts executable

chmod +x scripts/*.sh

Run in order

sudo bash scripts/10-prereqs.sh sudo bash scripts/20-install.sh sudo bash scripts/30-provision.sh sudo bash scripts/40-dns-forwarder.sh sudo bash scripts/50-verify.sh sudo bash scripts/60-create-objects.sh

Check service

sudo systemctl status samba-ad-dc --no-pager

Documentation

Detailed guides for each stage of this lab are available in the docs/ directory:

• 01-install.md – prerequisites and static IP/hostname setup.
• 02-provision.md – domain provisioning.
• 03-dns-kerberos.md – DNS and Kerberos configuration.
• 04-verify.md – verification checklist.
• troubleshooting.md – common issues and fixes.

Refer to these documents if you need more detail on a particular step or are troubleshooting problems.