Samba Domains & Password authenication

[Chris Hines]

I would like to use samba as an NT domain controller for NT 4 & Windows 9X
and posibly windows 2000. I have configured samba 2.0.7 and samba NTG as
domain controllers and they seem to work.

We wish our users to use a single password accross UNIX & windows which
are copied from a central NIS map managed by the University. Some time in
the future the university intends to start and active directory and
provide us with a windows password server. 

Using the plain text registry update I was hopping to get samba to
1) validate machine passwords from the smbpassword file
2) validate user passwords from NIS or later from a password server
   
Is this posible? Does the samba architure already do this or is there some
documentation around which would point me to correct region of the code to
do this?

As for windows 2000, is samba TNG stable enought to use as a domain
controller? It seem to work well enought with the two machines I tested
with. 

Many thanks for your help.


Chris