samba - Sep 2003 - Windows to Samba Print servers

I suspect from everything that I've read that this may not be possible.
However, I'd love to hear otherwise.

Basically, we have a windows NT 4.0 domain with a pre-existing PDC and 4
BDC's. Roughly 80 percent of the servers in the domain are windows 2000. We
have about 1000 users we support in the domain.

We're thinking about moving our print servers off of windows 2000 and onto
linux/samba. Here's what we need to achieve:

1. Users must be able to add the printer to their windows NT/2000
workstations with only local user permissions and have the drivers download
automatically.
2. Users must be able to identify their print job in the print queue and be
able to delete it.

My question is this: Can we do this without having to make the samba server
the PDC and can we do this without having to enter in all 1000 accounts on
the linux server? (We really don't want to manage 2 user databases). Taking
this a little further, it seems like we could set it up to update both user
databases at the same time, but I'm still a little unclear on this? I read
that Samba servers can't talk to BDC's and that makes me nervous.

One of the admins here says that adding a local "lp" account to our
windows
workstations will fix our problems....I can't see how? Wouldn't that
just
make each user show up in the queue as "lp" and wouldn't each user
have to
login as lp locally anyways?

I apologize for asking so many questions in one post.

On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 07:04:24PM -0400, Tim wrote:
> I suspect from everything that I've read that this may not be possible.
> However, I'd love to hear otherwise.
> 
> Basically, we have a windows NT 4.0 domain with a pre-existing PDC and 4
> BDC's. Roughly 80 percent of the servers in the domain are windows
2000. We
> have about 1000 users we support in the domain.
> 
> We're thinking about moving our print servers off of windows 2000 and
onto
> linux/samba. Here's what we need to achieve:
> 
> 1. Users must be able to add the printer to their windows NT/2000
> workstations with only local user permissions and have the drivers download
> automatically.
> 2. Users must be able to identify their print job in the print queue and be
> able to delete it.
> 
> My question is this: Can we do this without having to make the samba server
> the PDC and can we do this without having to enter in all 1000 accounts on
> the linux server? (We really don't want to manage 2 user databases).
Taking
> this a little further, it seems like we could set it up to update both user
> databases at the same time, but I'm still a little unclear on this? I
read
> that Samba servers can't talk to BDC's and that makes me nervous.
Yes, you can do this by adding the Samba server into the domain and running
winbindd on it. You don't need a Samba PDC for this. This is what the HP
PSA product does (it's also running Samba on Linux). Samba servers can and
do talk to BDC's all the time. You need to set up the point-and-print on
the Samba servers.

Alternatively you could just buy the PSA (yes this is a commercial plug for
a product I've spent a couple of years on, sorry :-).

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF02a/18972-236253-64451.html

This has all this stuff already set up for you :-).

Jeremy.