Windows Networking

I haven't a clue where DANY comes from. Please don't ask me these questions.
CIFS = SMB. They changed the name a few years back, but SAMBA sounds kinda cool, so it kept it's name.
NetBIOS is not routable. You may remember seeing that in the good ol' days of Win 3.11... with NetBEUI. Since Win95, the standard has been NetBIOS over TCP/IP (instead of IPX/SPX (novell)).
Samba TNG (the next generation) is an interesting project... but not really useful unless you need FULL NT 4.0 support. Advice-- stick to normal Samba.
Please, don't use the domain UNISYS... it'll confuse everyone. Use the domain UNISYSXX (where XX is your number, or UNISYSXXX, let XXX be your initials, or whatever).

Password Synchronization

This is a fun little issue. The problem is that both NTLM (Windows) and Unix password hashes are one-way, meaning you encrypt a password, then store that. You then encrypt a password attempt, and if the encrypted hashes match, the passwords must match. (In other terms, save crypt(pw). Test if crypt(attempt)==crypt(pw), if so, assume attempt=pw). There are many good reasons for this, but the downside is that there is no way to have windows and linux keep a common logon, unless they are encrypted using the same scheme. If you set "encrypted passwords = no", then Windows will send the shares passwords in clear-text, which can be checked with the linux passwd file. To have domain logins shared, you've got a bit more of a task, since they are always sent encrypted.

Dual Booting

This way lets Windows handle the dual boot. This is probably a safer idea, given the use of NTFS. The alternative is to let LILO/GRUB handle it. Bonus experience points if you're familiar with one or both of these methods. For a FAT partition, I'd definitely use the lilo bootloader... for NTFS, having Windows take care of things is probably simpler. If you get into trouble-- fdisk /mbr from windows, or linux rescue and reinstalling the linux boot loader should help you out.

[TA Homepage | Course Homepage | Email Me | Contact Info]