The term foreign SID is often met with the reaction that it is not relevant to a particular environment. The following documents an interchange that took place on the Samba mailing list. It is a good example of the confusion often expressed regarding the use of winbind.

Fact: Winbind is needed to handle users who use workstations that are NOT part of the local domain.

Response: “Why? I've used Samba with workstations that are not part of my domains lots of times without using winbind. I thought winbind was for using Samba as a member server in a domain controlled by another Samba/Windows PDC.”

If the Samba server will be accessed from a domain other than the local Samba domain, or if there will be access from machines that are not local domain members, winbind will permit the allocation of UIDs and GIDs from the assigned pool that will keep the identity of the foreign user separate from users that are members of the Samba domain.

This means that winbind is eminently useful in cases where a single Samba PDC on a local network is combined with both domain member and domain non-member workstations. If winbind is not used, the user george on a Windows workstation that is not a domain member will be able to access the files of a user called george in the account database of the Samba server that is acting as a PDC. When winbind is used, the default condition is that the local user george will be treated as the account DOMAIN\george and the foreign (non-member of the domain) account will be treated as MACHINE\george because each has a different SID.