Samba PDC with 100+ Client Experiences?

[Benjamin Suto]

First of all, kudos to the Samba crew.  You've made a great application,
which will hopefully commodotize Microsoft's biggest asset, their NT
server.

I've set up Samba 2.0.0 as a PDC with roaming profiles.  All seems to
work well with the small limited set of machines I've used.  Backgrounds
and all settings seem to be saved, and all works well.  It took quite a
bit of time to get working properly, but it seems to work with no
problems.

At this point, I'm in need of a little bit of advice.  

How is Samba with scalability?  The company I'm consulting for would
like to run 100+ clients using the Samba PDC, and I'd like to know what
to expect.

Do I have to patch my kernel for file descriptors?  I will be running a
copy of 2.2 by the time the server is fully operational.

What kind of hardware should I be looking into putting into the server? 
The server will mainly be serving roaming profiles and user documents
and data.

What kind of optimizations should I look at, to keep the system running
optimally?

Are there any problems with using it with so many clients at once?

What about file locking?

Tape backup solutions?  What solutions are out there (pay or
otherwise)?   It needs to be a proven and reliable program, since this
is a rather mission-critical server.

Are there any other problems that may show up with so many clients that
I should be aware of? 

Are there any resources out there for finding this information out,
other than pestering the people in this news group?


Thanks for your help, whichever kind soul decides to write back.

Ben