Setting up Samba as AD DC

I’m trying to set up a linux server as a Windows domain controller using Samba, and… something’s going wrong.

I’m working from the directions at https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting_up_Samba_as_an_Active_Directory_Domain_Controller but I’m not getting the results that they describe that I should.

So, before going through the steps in that document… I started with a working DNS setup running off of my router (an older ZyXel business one, FWIW), which was also my DHCP server, and which had MAC/IP mappings for all my machines.

I followed the steps in the above document, down to the provisioning section, without any hint of problem. I ran the provisioning command interactively, mostly using the defaults (the one change was to set a DNS forwarding to my old DNS server). I didn’t get any errors from running that, although there was a warning about being unable to determine the DomainSID.

What has me baffled, at this point, though, is that DNS should be going through this machine. But named isn’t running (and no zone was set up; samba-tool default of ‘SAMBA_INTERNAL’ was used for DNS backend). Nothing is listening on port 53.

Further, once I change /etc/resolv.conf as specified, all name resolution breaks (except for the "DC" machine itself, specified in the hosts file). Plus, as I alluded earlier, if I try to create the zone reverse lookup as documented, I get an error message about connection refused on port 135 (no surprise, as netstat shows nothing listening on that port. Only on 22/ssh, 631/ipp, 31416 (?), and 3389/ms-wbt-server).

So it seems like maybe I’m missing a step somewhere, but no idea what.

There’s also the question why, if an address can’t be found within SAMBA_INTERNAL, it isn’t found by the forwarder. I noticed that there is no mention of the forwarder in the samba-tool provisioning output, but not sure if there should be.

Anyway, does all this make sense to anyone? Or does anyone have suggestions for what I should be looking at, to tell what’s going on?

Thanks.