samba authenticated logins

[eric]

hello all...

i posted this in samba-general, but nobody answered. I assume the 
problem was too complex for that list's members...

i'm running freebsd 4.8 release on our fileservers. we serve files to 
over 50 macintosh OS 9 clients, and we use netatalk to do it. However, 
all our username/password info is managed by the corporate IT dept. and 
they run Win2000. To avoid having to maintain my own password database, 
I'd like to use the authentication mechanism built into samba to 
authenticate our netatalk users. I'd also like to expand that 
authentication scheme to allow unix interactive logins using usernames 
hosted from the company's domain controller.

This probably isn't even possible, yet..

Can anybody help me on this? Specifically what extra ports I need to 
install or options I must recompile with? Can I use PAM to help?

please also reply to my email eric_at_astria.org

thanks,

/eric