Samba help please

[Xiderpunk]

I hate to admit defeat, but I am about at that point. Truth is I really don't understand how Samba fits in with LISa and NFS.

To start at the beginning, my network was thus:

192.168.1.1 - Router IP55 Checkpoint Firewall running DHCP and DNS
192.168.1.100 - Windows 2000 Advanced Server as PDC
192.168.1.2 - Windows XP Pro domain member
192.168.1.3 - Gentoo Linux domain member (kinda)
192.168.1.4 - Gentoo Linux domain member (sorta)
192.168.1.5 - Windows 2000 Pro domain member
192.168.1.6 - Windows 2000 Pro domain member
192.168.1.7 - Windows XP domain member

This all worked together fine, with the gentoo machines able to access shares on the domain controller (acting as file server also).

Plan was to move the PDC from Windows 2000 too Gentoo Linux with Samba running as a PDC to serve files/DNS/mail to the rest of the machines. I read and read as much as I could before starting this process and it all sounded easy enough... how wrong could I have been.

Basically the situation I now find myself in is a complete mess, the samba domain server appears to be setup fine, I have spent hours checking each and every setting in smb.conf against the tutorials.

Windows 2000 machines will not allow me to join them to the domain, stating that a global account should be used. The windows XP machines have joined with the wrong machine name (?!?) and won't allow me to alter their names, roaming profiles are not working at all, with access denied messages.

Linux clients cannot browse the PDC shares, unknown errors.

The main point of this tale of woe, how should I setup this network? should I forget about running a PDC (loathe to switch back to windows 2000). How should the linux pc's fit into a samba pdc? they need to logon?

I am fully willing to RTFM, just need to find out what MTFR... can an experienced techy/guru point me in the right direction? either with a little advice or a suggestion to how to proceed?

Many thanks in advance.

[Xiderpunk]

*Update*

Ok.. after many more hours of fighting with these hellspawn-masquerading-as-pc's I think I'm beginning to get somewhere. Seems the auto useradd script was not working in smb.conf, adding the machine accounts manually worked and all is well. The windows boxes can now logon to the domain correctly.

However..

One small remaining problem, the linux pc is experiencing all manner of wierdness. This pc is not logging onto the PDC purely because I don't yet know how to configure that in smb.conf, but more importantly when the machine reboots or I try and restart samba, it reports an error about unable to kill process which doesn't exist. I tried re-emerging to no avail.

Any help?