[Samba] Unified authentication

[Chris Trown]

      Greetings.  Apologies if this has been asked before.  I've gone 
through Google and the archives to no avail.

      I am seeking to implement a unified authentication mechanism for a 
small(Less than 50 users) setup.  I've been trying to wrap my head 
around PAM and SAMBA.  It almost seems like it can be done, but I can't 
quite convince myself.

      Most of my users are Windows types.  I want to provide domain 
authentication for these users.  Using the same auth DB, I want to be 
able to authenticate some users to a VPN server using RADIUS.  All with 
teh same user/password combo.

      I've seen glimmers and hints in various doc I've read that it can 
be done.  Maybe using PAM to force radius to use the smbpass.so module?

      Another thought I had was to use MySQL as the backend.  But then, 
I'm not sure that the passwords would be compatible.  They're both 
one-way hashs using different algorithms, right?

      I could use LDAP, but it seems like overkill.  So is MySQL, 
really, but I can use the server for other tasks later.

      Any thoughts?

Chris...