“The SAMBA team is working on code that will lead to “killer
appliances” according to author Jeremy Allison. At the very least,
it could offer an opportunity to reduce the need for many of the NT
servers that are deployed today.“
“Winbind hooks into the authentication mechanism used by Linux
and most commercial Unixes, and replicates user and group
information that’s stored on a Windows NT/2000 server. It offers a
single sign-on to Windows user information and works transparently
with existing Unix software. Currently, sites using the open source
SAMBA replacement for Windows file-and-print services must keep the
Windows user database and the SAMBA server’s user information in
sync, a pretty tedious job.”
“The code is slated for release later this year, but The
Register has had a sneak preview. Although the code is still in a
pretty rough state, it worked seamlessly with existing Linux
software. For example, once logged in using Winbind, group
information was visible in KDE’s file properties box as well as ls
and other command line programs.”