[Samba] Slow Links

[Ray Klassen]

we have about thirty vpn links in our network and all workstations
connect back to head office and authenticate to a samba domain with
ldap as the back end. In conjunction with a new software rollout (it's
web-based is completely unrelated to samba) I've been installing new
machines and approximately doubling my user base. What I'm finding is
that domain operations at the other end of an otherwise functional
VPN, can be hit and miss. Joining and disjoining a machine to a domain
is consistently possible. Renaming a machine works rarely -- "bad
password". Sometimes I've had to power cycle a computer to force it to
log back into the domain because my brand new users can't log into the
machines. ("Domain MYDOMAIN is not available")  I found I had fewer
problems (i.e. I could work around the issues) after I increased the
password chat timeout. Are there any other settings I should
implement?

Factors that might be turning this problem up after years of not
noticing it are --

Recent upgrade of samba from 3.0.28 to 3.0.34
Recent upgrade of samba.schema to support substring searches of sambaSID
The new boxes are running XP while the ones they are replacing ran 2000

thanks for your help in the recent past.