“The latest version of Samba, the free software that provides
systems running Linux and Unix with Windows-compatible file and
print services, now works more closely than ever with Windows.
Samba 3.0, which became available last month, enables machines to
join an Active Directory domain as a native member and to
authenticate users with LDAP and Kerberos. For companies that use
Active Directory, these improvements can make a mixed- platform
server environment easier to manage.“Samba now supports publishing printer attributes in Active
Directory and can establish trust relationships with Windows NT 4.0
domain controllers.“Samba cannot yet serve as an Active Directory domain controller
or a Windows NT-style backup domain controller. However, its
capability as an NT-style primary domain controller offers sites
that have held off on deploying Active Directory a strong option
for replacing their Windows file and print servers with Linux boxes
running Samba–for which they needn’t buy client access
licenses…”