Samba in heterogeneous 95/NT environment

[Daniel Polombo]

Hello.

  We are considering using a samba-based architecture with Unix file/print
servers
instead of installing NFS clients on every PC, and I have been asked to
study
samba and give a presentation at some point.

  So far, my main problem is, we want to use it in a heterogeneous
win95/NT4(sp4)
environment. While samba (2.0.5) does work perfectly well with NT, we have
an
authentication problem with 95 : the connection negotiation does not ask
for a
username/password, which means in turn that, if the win95 user hasn't first 
provided a username (using the client for M$ networks) that is valid on the
samba 
server, there's no way he can access a share.

  We have seen a number of solutions to that problem (always authenticating
the 
user when he logs on the win95 machine, declare user= in the smb.conf), but
they are not quite perfect (the first solution may cause problem when using
the share security level, and the second won't do for a large number of
users,
especially since two users might have the same password).

  What I would like to know is whether there is a "standard", or generally
accepted solution to this problem, or maybe a way to tweak samba to 
compensate for the weaknesses of win95.

Thanks in advance,

	Daniel.