A couple of days ago, I was given the task of replacing a mail server -- old hardware, network topology changes, and personnel changes led up to this. Now, the actual swapout of a mail server is relatively straightforward and (somewhat) easy to do. But this one had a wrench -- I had to authenticate off of an NT4 domain. There were some other, smaller, wrenches as well, but they have nothing to do with this story. Lost, I started out simple -- pam_smb_auth. I compiled this and examined the code and installed it and tried to authenticate, and recompiled and reinstalled and tried again, and recompiled and reinstalled... This went on for a couple of hours, each time trying something a little bit differently. I looked at other pam_smb_auth setups, and they were all working, but this one wasn't. Then I found out that the author doesn't guarantee that pam_smb_auth will work on a FreeBSD machine. Oops. So I moved over to Samba. I'm now kicking myself in the ass; I should have *known* to start here. The FreeBSD ports tree helped out a fair bit, but one make command and twenty minutes later, I changed my domain information, netbios name, and joined the domain. Then it took me all of two minutes to get pam_winbind installed (the ports system doesn't install it, strangely) and authenticating. No hassles, no problems. It just worked. So while I've done my share of complaining in the past, I just thought I'd extend an overwhelming Thanks! to the Samba team. You've made my life easier, and blown everyone else out of the water with how easy this all was. - Damian