Samba against remote LDAP

[mogambo]

Hi,

I am trying to get Samba running on one linux machine configured to
authenticate against a remote ldap server.  As I was envisioning this was
that this was similar to authenticating against remote ADS.  However, the
information that I have been looking into online makes me think that that is
not the case.  The configuration tutorials indicate that LDAP server needs
to run locally?  Can a Samba server basically become a member server of an
ldap domain ala ADS and forward authentication request to the ldap server?
 I would really appreciate some clarification.

Thanks,
-m.