Is there any way to join Active Directory without admin privileges? Joining is working just fine for Domain Admins. But ... one way for a Windows system to join is for the administrator to pre-create the computer account, and to set the name or group with authority to join the computer to Active Directory. That doesn't work with a Samba server, however. My Active Directory server runs Windows Server 2003. The domain is tiny, just like 10 machines, and it exists mainly to test things like this. However, the problem also occurred at Unisys when I tried it there.
This works fine. The configuration issue in on the ACL for the server object in AD. Have you admin set it correctly so that your user account can set the password an account control flags. no bug here.
It looks like I can join with another account as long as I use: net rpc join -U notadmin Rather than: net ads join -U notadmin Can you confirm that? I know it doesn't mention this in The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide. Anyway, net ads join only works in my environment with a Domain Admin, even if the security on the Active Directory side is good.