[Samba] Authenticating to a MacOS X server

[Luke Sharkey]

Hello

I am currently testing Fedora Core 6 i386 on a moderately sized network 
(with the permission of the system administrator), with 150 or so computers, 
some running Mac OSX and others running NT 4.0.

As to the storage of personal files and authentication, there is both a NT 
4.0 server (for the NT 4.0 machines to authenticate to) and a Mac OSX server 
(for the Mac OS X machines to authenticate to).

Having *never really done all that much networking before*, I am having 
problems detecting the Apple Mac servers.   I am able to use konqueror  to 
access smb:/ and browse the Windows server quite easily (even though I have 
not yet set up smb.conf; why is this, by the way?), and authenticating to 
the NT4.0 server, using the Samba-howto and winbind, would not prove too 
difficult, I think.

However, the NT 4.0 server is due to be replaced some time this year, and so 
I would like to be able to authenticate to the OSX server instead.  
Nonetheless, though documentation for authenticating to Windows servers on 
the internet is excellent (samba howto, etc.)  I can find very little about 
connecting to OSX networks.

Can anyone tell me where I can find some documentation, etc., or give me a 
head start?  At the moment, as I've already said, I don't even know how to 
detect the OS X server (it may be password protected, by the way).

Secondly, seeing as OS X is unix and is distantly related to Linux, (I know 
this is a strange question to ask on a Samba mailing list) but is there 
anyway I could authenticate to the Apple server without using Samba?  I 
would like to be able to have the /home partitions on the server, and I know 
Samba has problems with this due to the sockets that KDE / etc. uses

Thanks,
LS

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