Guest access even when domain is out of service?

[Eric Wallace]

[cross-posted to Samba & Samba-NTdom.]

I'm proposing Samba as a solution for several problems in an enterprise environment. However, high availability is absolutely critical to some applications, hence the question...

Since Samba apparently can't serve up "local" accounts when it's using domain-level security (couldn't this be made an option?!?), I need to know if a domain-member configured Samba server will allow "guest" access (assuming it's configured properly) even when all the NT domain controllers are completely unavailable. Or, does the domain security call upon the domain's guest account, and therefore not work when the domain is gone? Will there be a time delay (timeout contacting domain controllers) before Samba allows the guest login? Has anyone really tested and proved this?

Thanks for your input!

	~eric w. wallace
	   national semiconductor/maine
	   i.s. infrastructure systems engineer