[Samba] Samba 2.2.5 + OpenLDAP 2.x - Caveats?

[Freeman, Peter (ERHS)]

Hi List(s)

I'm in the process of configuring a new PDC using Samba 2.2.5.
At the present time we have 9 other Samba PDCs in nonconnected
sites.  In the next few months, these sites will become part of 
a WAN and we're looking to migrate authentication for these 
servers to a single box, for obvious administration benefits.  
The client base is primarily Win2k, SP2 & SP3.

Now I'm making the presumption that Samba + LDAP is the right path
to go down in this type of situation, correct me if I'm wrong, I've
only been looking into this for the past week or so, and yes I've 
been reading the Samba docs and the OpenLDAP docs, so don't tell me
to RTFM :), I'm just after real world experiences here....

Can anyone with experience in this type of setup comment on any 
issues they struck while migrating from smbpasswd based systems
to central LDAP authentication.

What version of OpenLDAP would you recommend?  2.0.x or 2.1.x? 
Pros/cons for either version?  I notice the schema file packaged with
Samba has support for 2.1.x.

Were there any issues in migrating existing users, ie: file permissions,
profiles, etc?

What is the speed like over a WAN environment for a local Samba box
to authenticate against a remote LDAP server, over say a 64k link?

Any other comments?

Thanks for your input in advance