we have about thirty vpn links in our network and all workstations connect back to head office and authenticate to a samba domain with ldap as the back end. In conjunction with a new software rollout (it's web-based is completely unrelated to samba) I've been installing new machines and approximately doubling my user base. What I'm finding is that domain operations at the other end of an otherwise functional VPN, can be hit and miss. Joining and disjoining a machine to a domain is consistently possible. Renaming a machine works rarely -- "bad password". Sometimes I've had to power cycle a computer to force it to log back into the domain because my brand new users can't log into the machines. ("Domain MYDOMAIN is not available") I found I had fewer problems (i.e. I could work around the issues) after I increased the password chat timeout. Are there any other settings I should implement? Factors that might be turning this problem up after years of not noticing it are -- Recent upgrade of samba from 3.0.28 to 3.0.34 Recent upgrade of samba.schema to support substring searches of sambaSID The new boxes are running XP while the ones they are replacing ran 2000 thanks for your help in the recent past.