Newbie alert! Hi there, I would like to setup our samba server so that users known to the server can login to Win2k clients without having a local account on those machines in the first place, i.e. authenticate against the server. From the excellent online documentation I learnt that I would have to setup samba to act as PDC first so I set out to do this. The one thing which really gives us problems here is that every machine needs a local unix account and that the machine's "trust" account name needs to contain a '$' character. Because of the special meaning of '$' for shell scripts and regular expressions this would potentially break all sorts of stuff we are currently using to maintain our accounts. Is there any way to setup samba as PDC - by either using machine trust accounts without any special characters, or - without creating an /etc/passwd entry for each machine altogether (preferred)? BTW: I found the following quote at <samba.mirror.aarnet.edu.au/samba/docs/Samba-HOWTO-Collection.html#AEN1189>: Because Samba requires machine accounts to possess a UNIX uid from which an Windows NT SID can be generated, all of these accounts must have an entry in /etc/passwd and smbpasswd. Future releases will alleviate the need to create /etc/passwd entries. Can anyone tell me for which release this is planned to be the case? TIA Ronald