On Friday 01 August 2008 5:27:50 pm Ryan Dunn wrote: If you are running your lan as a lab to learn, I would suggest one thing. From what I have read, it seems you just want to have everything work together in a simple manor. Since you have windows involved, you might consider having everything run with samba. With samba, every system would be able to share and use shares on every other computer. You could set up a samba server as a domain controller and use something like pam_smb, pam_ntdom or libpam-smbpass (i've used libpam-smbpass on other systems, but do know if centos makes it available anywhere, it is the only one that I know of that allows for update of the password from Linux) to allow the Linux boxes to authenticate against the samba server. http://www.freebooks.by.ru/view/SambaIn24h/ch16-03.htm In this case, you would not need to set up LDAP which I think is a bit much for what it sounds like you are trying to do. Because you would be mounting Linux to Linux using Samba, you would not need to worry about NFS at all. If it were just a Linux home network, I would do NFS3 with (probably a bad word here) NIS. Yes, NIS is insecure, but so is NFS3. If you use a firewall that would block outgoing NIS packets, it should do good enough for a home network. How this simplifies everything: 1: Only one network file system for both windows and Linux, not NFS for Linux, samba for windows. 2: Allows Linux access to windows shares and printers. 3: If you are using libpam-smbpass you do not need to use a something like LDAP, but rather passdb backend = tdbsam . Your needs may be more complex than what I assumed, but I wanted to put forward one way to consider...