[Samba] Linux as an AD Client questions

[Aaron Bennett]

Hello --

I'm trying to come up with a seamless way for our Red Hat 8  ( and 
eventually, Mac OS X ) users to access network resources that are shared 
via our Active Directory.  I'm having a very rough time figuring out 
exactly how to approach this. 

Our requirements (ie, pie in the sky wish list) are:

1. when logging on to Gnome/KDE via gdm, users must be able to use their 
AD credentials
2. Users must have their home directory from Windows mounted as their 
Linux home directory
3. passwords should remain in sync


Items 1 & 3 can be accomplished via winbind and pam.  I'm not too 
worried about that.  But it's item 2 that is the sticky one.  Is there 
something I'm missing in smbclient or the smbfs kernel support that 
could somehow pass the login credentials that the machine has received 
through winbind/pam to mount a directory?

I've even thought about setting up some sort of gateway machine running 
Samba 3 that is a member of the AD and mounts all the home directories 
and re-shares them, but this seems really, really kludgy.

Is this something that samba can accomplish, or am I barking up the 
wrong tree?

Regards and Thanks,

Aaron Bennett
UNIX Administrator
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
abennett at olin.edu