Transfer of samba credentials to new installation?

[Stefan Recksiegel]

Dear all,

I have a question that I have not been able to answer by searching the 
archives:

We have a cluster of about 250 computers that used to authenticate
against a local LDAP server. I am currently in the process of migrating
to our institute's ADS infrastructure. I join each host with
"net ADS JOIN" and everything works as expected, so far so good.

We have a highly automated installation system (based on Debian
pre-seeding) where booting from the network just re-installs the
complete system with the latest release. Unfortunately, when using
ADS authentification, this means I manually have to log in to each
host to perform the join (unless I keep the ADS password in some
script, which I do not want to do).

Can I somehow transfer the ADS joining data in /var/lib/samba/private/
from the old installation to the new installation to avoid having
to do a new join after upgrading the system?

Thanks for your help             Stefan