[Samba] Office moving to a Domain system. Looking for some advice.

[Michael Kelly]

Hello all,

I currently maintain an office of 15 employees. All clients are running
Windows 200 Professional, although there has been discussion of
introducing a couple of Linux workstations on a testing basis. 

As part of the office infrastructure we have three Linux machines, a
firewall/gateway/webserver/FTP server/openVPN machine running Samba for
access to webserver directories and documents, a Samba file server that
also acts as a WINS server, and a machine that is dedicated to nightly
backups of the file server, this box also runs Samba to share out the
backup files.

The office is currently setup using a workgroup system and we feel it
is time to enjoy the benifits of a domain system with a Samba PDC. I
have done some preliminary research into the setup of everything but
would like to get some advice from those more experienced than myself
before I begin my journey.

This is what I would like.
1. The file server to be the PDC as well as an application server. not
sure if we will go with roaming profiles yet or not.
2  All authentication to be centralized to the PDC. I beleive I can
achieve this with winbind running on the two other machines running
Samba.
                  -currently I am maintaining the same Samba password
files on all three systems and it is a pain to co-ordinate
3. Eliminate the need to have each workstation user also be a user on
the Linux systems
4. Eventually be able to move to an openLDAP authentication system
without have to redo everything.


I know my point are pretty general, but I am just starting with the
concepts and developing my requirements, also, this is my first entry
into the world of domains so my knowledge is a little sparse.

As a note I am reasonably comfortable with basic Samba configuration,
manual edits, and administration with Linux

Thanks for any assistance
Michael Kelly