CentOS - Aug 2007 - CentOS/RH 5 Samba as PDC+NIS w/o LDAP?

For those who are new or forget - I have a RHEL 5 Server and a few 
dualboot XP w/SP2 and CentOS 5 systems.  The Linux machines were installed 
straight of CD/DVD, no patches.

I was initially going to try a single sign-on to the RH 5 box via LDAP, 
but RH says it simply isn't possible and I don't know my way around LDAP
other than it is a database and exists.

So, option 2 is to simply have the RH 5 Server act as a Windows PDC via 
Samba and use NIS to enable users to log in, all the while, in either 
situation, having the RH 5 box serve out the user's central home directory 
- mounted as a drive letter under Windows, or exported under Linux.

I've spent much of last week and much of today [trying to learn] LDAP, and 
today, finally deciding to dump that, but proceeding with Samba as a PDC.

For Samba as a PDC - what is the best way to have Win XP Pro w/SP2 
successfully authenticate to Samba as a domain controller with encyrpted 
passwords?  And, to have Samba establish the user's home directory as a 
mapped drive?  I've used a barrage of web sites showing various smb.conf 
confing files but can't yet get my test XP machine to authenticate to the 
domain I set in my smb.conf file.

For NIS - what is the best way to permit the user to log into their 
account, created on RH 5 server, and have their home directory exported to 
their workstation?

I presume there will be no problem with users simultaneously logging into 
multiple workstations, be it Linux or Windows?

I only bother the list because I have scoured so many web sites, some with 
a variety of options, I believe I'll get the best answer here.

Thanks.

Scott

Thinking of using CentOS as a host for a Linux Appliance.  

I am used to building Embedded Linux Systems and there the approach is
to create the a directory on the development machine and "get files
"that are to be on the target machine into that directory. This usually
being termed as building the root file system. Also in the embedded
systems approach we build from source and usually during the configure
steps of package we can specify where the end binaries/libraries need to
be copies. 

So for Cent OS thinking of using a similar approach with the difference
that I don't want to build all packages from source.

1)Use the binrary rpms and install to a directory on a development
machine  using the rpm --prefix option.   Not sure yet how to specify to
create and use an rpm database on the development machine as opposed to
a database on the development machine.

Is this really a sensible approach or just using something like
Kickstart?

2) There might be some packages that I want to build from source. Then I
am thinking I would need the exact compiler used to compile the binary
rpms. How would I obtain the compiler and environment used to build the
CentOS binary rpms?

Thx,
-Venkat

Check out Samba by Example on the samba site.

Lots of examples there and I pulled one of my configs from there.

-- 
-=/>Thom