Rather than re-iterate what others have said before, let me make a couple of general observations which you may find of help; I apologise if I am repeating only what you may have done. You speak of a domain so I assume you are wanting to use your machine as a PDC (primary domain controller). Have you ensured that no other machine is trying to be PDC and these appear in smb.conf [global] domain master = yes local master = yes preferred master = yes os level = 65 (actually I use >=127; it forces the Linux box to win any elections with genuine Windows boxes) wins support = yes (useful to have it as the WINS server, too) I think you are unlikely to need to use the "remote announce" parameter unless either staff machines or student machines as a block have problems authenticating. Being sure, then, that all user ids are in both the Linux and Samba password lists (assuming you aren't configuring PAM/Winbind yet) ensure that there are suitable netlogon and profile directories. Also, you will need to ensure that machine accounts exist for the relevant members so that gives rise to the question of IP addresses and names - fixed or DHCP? It doesn't matter but the hosts table or DNS must be configured to find the ip/name mappings. It is easier to set up as a workgroup machine rather than PDC at first, then "convert" it. Can a standalone Windows machine see the samba name on the Network Neighbourhood? Can it then get access to a non-specific share? One of the problems between win9x/me and winnt/xp is that they don't necessarily use the same protocols and it is best if only one protocol (NetBIOS) is used by the clients. Even so, W2k/XP is not the same as NT3/4 (fancy). Name resolution is best in this order: name resolve order = wins lmhosts bcast host BUT I try to run only wins host where host means a full host or DNS resolution is available to the Samba machine. There are also several offline resources. I think "The Official Samba-3 howto and reference Guide" (Prentice Hall) is probably most comprehensive although it sometimes might need to be read twice. O'Reilly also do an excellent Samba-3 book which is less comprehensive but easier to read. It is an exercise worth completing unless you have to battle against an R-M server (!) because you will have a more robust and reliable server resource. Then you can add a small firewall/proxy and a backup server then you will be redundant! -- Best wishes, Derek