Thrasis

Ok here's a good one to help out a newbie. I recomended to my grad school to go to open source software which they did, but they put me in charge. So keep in mind with any answer that I am a newbie and not very good with networking. I need to be able to authenticate 20 linux boxes running mandrake 10.0 against an SMB server which holds a list of about 400 student and faculty profiles. Part of this is so that people at the school can acess their share spaces but also because it will be (hopefully) easier than loggin over 400 users on each box. Any help will be greatly appriciated. Also, does anyone know an easy way to enable networked duplex printing?

Aw, and here I thought I was learning too much already. Sarcasm aside, thanks for the information so far. It does interest me independant of whether or not I can use it. I'm reading through LDAP articles, but the boxes are supposed to take their authentication from the SMB (samba right?) for all identification and authentication. Any student or professor is supposed to be able to log onto any of the linux machines. Also, please let me know what additional information is needed on the SMB. Thanks for your help so far.