NT server, NT Gateway, Samba and .... ??

[Wu, Stephen (Aco Service Co.)]

Yes, I love SAMBA product. However, I have a technical question for our
experts here. Does anyone knows any good software acts like NT  Gateway :
which allow the NT server to browse our UNIX file systems and also can make
our UNIX file system on the NT server shareable to its own local LAN
clients?

We have a large remote site with about 400 clients need to read our UNIX
file system data daily. Right now, I am setting up them to read our Unix
data via SAMBA, which installed on our AIX 4.1.5 Unix server. It works great
and customer are happy. However, customer want to put more users. This will
bring up following issues :
*	We have to upgrade our AIX server RAM in order to bring more samba
clients to our AIX server.
*	Our enterprise Unix server are treated more like a LAN sever to
them, which will bring more daily samba related daily administration jobs to
my daily Unix administration works. It is inconvenient.
*	

Based on that, I am thinking to set up a NT server at the customer local
site to centralized the SAMBA clients. This will make its own local LAN
clients only authorize to its own site NT server instead of individually to
log into our AIX server. In order to mount our UNIX file system to NT server
and then it can share this network resource to its own local clients, the NT
server either can use a special gateway software I am hunting for or use
SAMBA if it is applicable for NT.  Currently,  I don't know who have make
this kind product available. Or, some expert here can tell me what should I
do.

I used a Netware Gateway software before, but the NFS/ Novell IPX
combination performance for our clients is unacceptable to them. SMB
performance is much better on WAN likewise. That is how we brought samba in
two year ago. However, as customer grows, a problem come down like this make
me to search another product be needed to put a intermediate gateway between
our AIX server and window clients.

Anyone has suggestions to this problems ? Any response will be greatly
appreciated !

Stephen  Wu
EDS OMS
Tel :    (248)696-1413 / [8-366]
Fax :   (248)696-1804
Email:  Stephen.Wu-EDS at EDS.COM