I have the following on a network: 1) RHEL 5.0 Server acting as NIS and Samba domain controller 2) CentOS 5.x machines on NIS network 3) Win XP machines on Samba domain When I create an account for someone, I need to first type adduser new_person -d /home/new_person then passwd new_person, then cd /var/yp and make. Then smbpasswd -a new_person. Thus, two different databases. On another network, I have separate XP and Linux (CentOS 5.x, RHEL 5.x, and Suse) systems. No Samba, no NIS. Can I still set up a central LDAP directory for a single account database? For the NIS+Samba case, can I merge both credential files into a central database using LDAP? I would also want to control password length, complexity, aging, and other things. What is the best way to do this? Thanks. Scott