TNG-stable

[Martin Radford]

> 
> If you can convince your AD admins to install the SFU package
> and provide NIS access to AD, in theory, you can serve NIS
> to your UNIX boxes and work Samba off of that (plain text).

There is, of course, the downside that you then need client access
licences for your Unix boxes and any other systems you use to connect
to those Unix boxes. 

> Of course, I'm not recommending this.  Just 
> pointing out possibilities.

Quite.  Back in the NT4 days, using Samba meant no requirement for
client access licences, even if you had an NT4 PDC (i.e. if the PDC
did the authentication and Samba did the file/print serving).  This
made Samba attractive.

Now that MS have changed their licencing policy (so that it's the
device that does the "authenticated access" that needs to be covered),
Samba is no longer as attractive (since there's no financial saving on
CALs, though it does save buying the Win2k server licences).

I think Samba support for LDAP authentication and support for Samba
managing Win2k domains will be our saviour in the long run.

Sorry for the mini-rant, and I know it's at least partly off-topic. I
think that MS has shown its true colours here with this change to
their licencing policies, but it does prove that they have taken
notice of Samba as a threat to their revenue stream.  And that gives
credit to all those who have worked on Samba over the past few years.

Martin
-- 
Martin Radford              |   "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ 
martin at zamenhof.demon.co.uk | men just upload their important stuff  -o)
Registered Linux user #9257 |  on ftp and let the rest of the world  /\\
- see http://counter.li.org |       mirror it ;)"  - Linus Torvalds _\_V