Encrypted passwords really necessary for PDC ?

[FAUCONNET Alain]

Hello,

I'm trying to switch our old "share-only" setup  of  SAMBA  to  a  PDC
configuration  and  migrating  all our W95 clients to NT/WS, trying to
make them secure.

I've  spent  hours  reading  the  documentation and testing, and a few
things are still unclear to me :

- are encrypted passwords really necessary for Samba to be used  as  a
PDC  ? a  few mails I've read here seem to imply that one can run with
plaintext  passwords,  but I have been unable to have a NT WS join the
domain controlled by Samba until I switch on encrypted passwords (yes,
I have applied the registry patch to the NT 4.0-SP4 WS). If  I  don't,
it says "The machine account for this computer either does  not  exist
or is not acessible".

-  what release branch is likely to give me the most usable PDC code ?
I've  found out that SAMBA_2_0 is the branch that seems to get all the
recent CVS commits. The "default" branch (is that the same as HEAD  ?)
appears to have older versions of many source  files,  so  I'm  a  bit
lost.  Is  2.1-prealpha  accessible to common mortals like myself ? If
so, what release branch id should be specified ?

- if I use  encrypted  passwords,  Samba  will  only  get  those  from
smbpassword and not from Unix /etc/passwd or NIS map, right ? How can
I "copy" my user's passwords from the NIS map to smbpasswd ? I've read
things  along  the  lines  of  "running  for  a  while  with cleartext
passwords" on this list but I don't get it yet.

Many thanks for your help,
_Alain_
--
Alain FAUCONNET  Ingenieur systeme/System Administrator   AP-HP/SIM
Public Health                91 bld de l'Hopital 75013 PARIS FRANCE
Medical Computing Research Labs         Mail: af at biomath.jussieu.fr
Tel: (+33) (0)1-40-77-96-19             Fax: (+33) (0)1-45-86-80-68
    I've RTFMed. It says: "Refer to your system administrator"
            But... I *am* the system administrator :-]