[Samba] Samba as a password server for Win NT/2k

[Loïc B.]

Hi,

I am a member of a students association in my school, and we have 3
computers under Windows (1 running Win2k and 2 running WinNT).
The members of the association, including myself, are sick and tired of
having to manually change their password on each machine individually,
every time this is required (that is, at least once a month).

I also have a linux box in the network. It is used as a gateway,
firewall, and mail+web server.
I'd like to have it act as a Windows server, so that I could set up the
workstations to authenticate to the linux box, as if it was a WinNT/2k
server. I read on the internet that this was possible. My final goal is
that, when some user logs in on any machine and changes his password,
the users database is updated on the server and the user can log in on
any other machine using the new password.

I also need the mail (i.e. linux) password and the Windows (i.e. samba)
password to be different, but the usernames should be the same (on linux
and windows). If I understood well, this is possible using the smbpasswd
file. I'd like to make sure of it.

But here comes my biggest problem : in the samba doc and howto, I came
accross two security settings that puzzle me.
I can't see whether I should use security = server or security = domain,
and how I should configure the whole thing. The doc says that in these
two modes, the password is passed to another box for authentication (a
WinNT/2k box). This annoys me because I have no WinNT/2k server, and I'd
like the samba server to do the job on his own. As English is far from
behing my mother language, I must have misunderstood something. The
question is : what ?

Has anyone already configured such a network ? Could you please give me
a few hints in easy-to-understand English about how to set up the whole
thing the way I want to ?

Thanks a lot

Loïc

--
"Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if
you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo ? How would you know the
difference between the dream world and the real world ?" (Morpheus to
Neo - The Matrix)


 
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