samba - Mar 2002 - How to set up a multi-subnet Samba network

I'm looking for suggestions and pros/cons on how to implement
this.
We've got a WAN setup with 3 Samba servers, each on it's own
leg of the WAN.  The 3 sites are connected by a wireless link that
is only capable of about 200k/sec.
Currently we have 3 samba servers, each the PDC of it's own domain.
The security is distributed via NIS so that all 3 servers have the same
passwd/group info.  These are FreeBSD servers so don't yet have a 
full PAM implementation.
Things were going very well until we started migrating from Win9X
to W2K.  Problem is that folks that are logging into (for exampe)
domain X can't easily access shares on the domain server for A.
I'm guessing that this is because Samba still doesn't have support
for trusts.  With W2K, you get asked for passwords again when you
try to connect to a different server, and (believe it or not) this is just
too much work for folks.
Additionally, persistent network connections to other servers do
not work at all.
We're considering putting all the servers in the same domain and
setting up a PDC/BDC system.  The only concern is the network
traffic this will cause across the wireless links when people log in.
(Windows always tries to log into the PDC first, correct?)
So ... first off, does anyone have any comments on pros/cons of this
approach?
Does anyone have a better approach?
Does anyone know how much traffic results from a network login?

This is a somewhat open-ended question.  I'm looking for input of
all types.

TIA,

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technology technical services
http://www.potentialtech.com

At 7:14 PM -0500 1/3/02, Bill Moran wrote:
>and (believe it or not) this is just
>too much work for folks.
Heh! Know that one :)
>Additionally, persistent network connections to other servers do
>not work at all.
>We're considering putting all the servers in the same domain and
>setting up a PDC/BDC system.  The only concern is the network
>traffic this will cause across the wireless links when people log in.
>(Windows always tries to log into the PDC first, correct?)
No, windows uses the BDC for authentication last I checked. The idea 
being that there are multiple BDCs for each domain, so that people 
can authenticate to them, and load them thru the roof if need be, 
while the fileserver stays on the PDC and can respond to file 
requests with the minimum of system overhead.
>So ... first off, does anyone have any comments on pros/cons of this
>approach?
Yes, samba 2.2.3a doesn't support either replicating to Windows BDCs 
or Samba BDCs. The recommended way of doing it is to have multiple 
machines running samba, using the same synced userlist, and work out 
some way to load share. There is a page in .es (sorry for being 
vauge) which has an explaination of how to do this.
>Does anyone have a better approach?
>Does anyone know how much traffic results from a network login?
I would personally run it as one domain, and see what happens from there.
-- 
Alex Dawson                                    CSU - Systems Administrator
     +-------------------+------------------------------------------------+
    /Tel: (08) 9380 1587/           Electrical and Electronic Engineering/
   /Fax: (08) 9380 1065/                 University of Western Australia/
  /alex@ee.uwa.edu.au /                  http://www.ee.uwa.edu.au/~alex/
+-------------------+------------------------------------------------+

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