Greetings - This may be a little off-topic here so if someone wants to point me to a more appropriate mailing list I would appreciate it. I administer the network for my small company and am preparing to install a new server in the next month or so. It will be running CentOS 6 and function primarily as a Samba file server to 10 Windows workstations (XP, Vista, 7). It will also host our OpenVPN server and possibly our FTP server; however I am hoping to move our FTP server to a gateway box when the new server is installed. The issue that I would like to be able to resolve when the new server is installed, is that currently if a user wants to change the password on their Windows workstation, I have to manually update that new password on the Linux user account, and also manually change the Samba user account. Manually updating the password in three different locations is a minor headache that I would like to correct. I have been researching and reading lots of information about account management to try and understand what is available, and what would be the best fit for my network size. Much of what I have read is related to larger networks or larger user bases, which seem to have a lot of extraneous stuff that would be unnecessary in my small user environment. I looked into OpenLDAP, and have recently been reading about Samba/Winbind. But after encountering the following statement in the Samba documentation, I am still lost about what I could, or should, be using. "A standalone Samba server is an implementation that is not a member of a Windows NT4 domain, a Windows 200X Active Directory domain, or a Samba domain. By definition, this means that users and groups will be created and controlled locally, and the identity of a network user must match a local UNIX/Linux user login. The IDMAP facility is therefore of little to no interest, winbind will not be necessary, and the IDMAP facility will not be relevant or of interest." My only goal is to be able to allow my users to change their Windows password at their workstation and have it perpetuate through the system so that it also changes their Linux User and Samba User account passwords. I don't expect to ever have more than a dozen users, so I want something that fits our size network and is simple to administer. I am not looking for a how-to to set something up, but some opinions about what I should consider using, and why it would be a good fit to achieve my goal. I can do the additional research to understand configuration once I know what I should be researching. Thanks. Please cc me directly, as I only get the list in daily digest mode. Jeff Boyce Meridian Environmental