Moving from Workgroup model to Domain

[Tom R Haws (PG)]

Hi,

I have recently taken over administration of a Samba installation.  I have 
experience administering a 5000-node NT domain (actually lots of domains, with 
trusts), and I am experienced in administering Solaris, but Samba is new to me, 
so I've subscribed to this mail list to try to get up to speed.  It's a great 
list, and the level of support is fantastic, especially to Samba newbies like 
me.

We have 5 Samba 2.0.5a servers on Solaris 2.7 (with NIS+ on the Solaris side, 
but no connection between smbpasswd and the NIS maps), each serving about 50 NT 
4.0 clients, with a couple of Win98 notebooks at each site.  We are currently 
operating in Security = User mode, because it was the simplest to implement, but 
it is a pain to administer, because people have to be manually added to each 
server if they want to access resources on a that server.

We now have a nice 10MBit WAN connection between all the sites, so I would like 
to move to a single Domain model, to make administration much simpler.  We would 
install the latest version of Samba when we go to make the transition, and would 
take that time to get all the NT clients up SP 6.0a.

I have a couple of questions to the gurus in the list regarding this transition:

1.  Is the Samba PDC model fully implemented?  How do you administer domain 
users, via SWAT?

2.  If so, how do SAM database replications happen?  With NT 4.0, the PDC and 
BDC's exchange user account information automagically.  Does this mechanism 
exist in Samba?

3.  Would a Wintel PDC with Samba BDC's be better?  I'm used to using User 
Manager for Domains to administer local and global groups on all servers.  How 
would I do that with Samba BDC's?

4.  I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask these questions.  Is there a white 
paper anywhere to check this out?

I appreciate any help this group has to offer on these questions.

-Thanks,
-Tom

_________________________________________________________________
Tom Haws
System Administrator   Inform Network for Management Systems
Tel: (250) 562-2628    1579 9th Ave, Prince George, B.C. V2L 3R8
Fax: (250) 562-6942
_________________________________________________________________