[Samba] Replacement of a windows 2000 PDC with active directory by samba/LDAP

[Olivier Navas]

Hi

I'm currently working on a project aiming at replacing all windows
servers (about 20) in my company by linux servers. Some of these windows
servers are windows 2000 domain controlers (one PDC and few BDCs) with
active directory. We have about 900 client windows 2000 workstations and
about 2/3 of them are domain members.

Our goal is to replace the windows servers that are domain controlers by
samba servers, and of course, to avoid as much as possible a migration
of the windows workstations because that would be a very long and human
resource intensive task.

Reading the samba documentation, I understand that samba 3 can act
roughly like a windows NT 4 PDC, but not like an active directory
server. My first conclusion is that our windows domain will probably
have to "downgrade" to a "NT 4 like" domain, but I don't really know
what impact this will have on windows 2000 workstations.

So these are my questions:
- Will we be able to achieve the replacement of the windows 2000 PDC et
BDCs without any action on windows workstations ? Or should we prepare
for bad days of workstations migration ?

- Does anybody have a similar experience ? 

Thanks for your help.

-- 
Olivier Navas
Groupement Informatique et Télécommunications
SDIS 33