[Samba] Windows XP Home accessing a Samba PDC

[Richard Gaywood]

A friend of mine has asked me a question in my role as "biggest local
geek" (for very small values of "local"). Googling hasn't turned up an
answer, so does anyone here know if this is possible?

At his business, they had a mixture of XP Home, XP Pro and Win98
machines accessing a Samba server with security=user. The server has
one big everyone-read-write drive and a few smaller areas restricted
to a few users by the "valid users" directive.

This isn't at all secure though, and means whenever a person gets a
new computer they have to mess about matching the username and
password with the Linux server. It is also becoming a pain to manage
as their network grows, and as they have now removed all the Win98 and
all except two of the XP Home clients, they are wondering about
switching Samba to become a PDC. This would allow them a lot more
flexibility in terms of permissions on the share, even without ACLs.

Obviously, the XP Home machines will not be able to log into the
domain. However, is there any way to allow them access to the public
everyone-read-write anyway, even though they are not in the domain?

Thanks for your help!