[Samba] Off Domain Login Problem

[Peter Walsh]

At the small non-profit I support I have a Mac OS X Server (10.4)  
supporting about 15 Windows XP clients. I use Open Directory for user  
management and the OS X Server is the PDC for the Windows domain. I  
have it set-up to use remote home folders on the server so any user  
can log in from any machine on the network. After a bumpy start, this  
is working very well. The users are not "power users" but have come to  
embrace the concept of there stuff not being tied to a specific machine.

Now I have two Windows XP laptops to add to the domain. They work fine  
while connected to the domain but can not authenticate while being  
used off site (e.g. disconnected from the domain). The local security  
policy on the laptop is set to cache the domain login but it always  
says it can not find the domain. Is there something in the Samba  
config I am missing?

If possible I want to avoid setting up the user as a local user on the  
laptop since they would now have stuff in two places.

If I do manage to get disconnected authentication to work, I also  
wonder what would happen with file synchronization. Will the two sets  
of use files merge? Will one folder overwrite the other? What about  
same name/diff modified dates?

Any thoughts/advice from someone who has tried a similar set-up that  
would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.