Finally got NIS client working. It was the firewall on the Server. I will try LDAP at a later date. Art Markus Natter wrote:
Art, again, I would not recommend you to start with setting up a LDAP server in this case.. except you want to play around with it, hours and hours, read many fn.. manuals.. If you are bored, or you got your primary problems solved, you could start to take a look at LDAP, which is an interesting field.. but not now, as you might get frustrated if nothing works. Start walking first, then try to build a ferrari.. ;)
1. NFS You could use NFS on windows too, if you'd install the windoze services for unix (SFU), you'd have to import your passwd / group file in the sfu snapin and generate user mappings. (which windoze user should act as which unix user..) NFS is simple to setup on Linux, on Windoze you might spend some minutes to work.. If your primary target is just filesharing, I'd go this way.
2. Samba Is another possibility. You could also run it parallel to NFS, of course. It's a bit more complicated here, and there are as well some caveats.. but you could give it a try, and there is a lot of help in the internet, and the shipped sample configs are quiet good to start with. The advantage of samba is to share your printers configured in cups with your windoze, printing to PDFs, specifying detailed ACLs ( but do you need them?) ...
If you'd use LDAP, you could use e.g. the LDAP Account Manager (LAM) to manage samba and unix account settings in one web based tool (I'm not sure, if YaST could deal with both user account types..).
To let Windoze authenticate against LDAP, I think it's possible, yet not easy (Kerberos Ticket handling..), and you should really not try by now.
hope this helps,
Markus