Linux – the difference between sambaLMPassword and sambaNTPassword

I'm not sure where to find such a point-by-point comparison. I've done a quick search and I'm not coming uo with much. There is some comparison in the official Samba HOWTO at: http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/samba-pdc.html

Here's some of such a comparison based on what I know:

• With a Samba "PDC", you get a centralized account / group database for your member computers, as you would with an Active Directory domain.

• You can use the NT 4.0 "User Manager for Domains" tool to manage Samba PDC users. Active Directory can be managed with the (IMHO, cleaner and easier to use) "Active Directory Users and Computers" tool.

• You can replicate the Samba PDC's security database in a single-master fashion or multi-master fashion between multiple domain controller computers (depending on the back-end you choose to store the password data in). Active Directory is multi-master.

• A Samba PDC will perform NTLM-based authentication. Active Directory can also peform NTLMV2 and Kerberos-based authentication.

• A Samba PDC cannot provide Group Policy functionality like an Active Directory domain controller computer can.

Functionally, Samba acts as an NT 4.0 "PDC", so you can use comparison documents between the Windows NT 4.0 domain system and Active directory to give you some additional ideas.

Samba 4.0, which is still under development, is supposed to fufill the Active Directory domain controller function. An experimental branch of the Samba code, called Frankly, also seeks to implement Active Directory domain controller functionality (see http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Franky).

I understand I'm someway "bypassing" the question, but I'm not sure you have already evaluated alternative approaches.

Alternative approach/suggestion:

• you can create an alias to the share
• D&D the alias into the System prefereces -> Accounts -> Login items
• you can connect and flag the "remember password" option to store it in you login keyring

This way you'll have the share auto-mounted on login, that is what you wanted I hope :)

Note that this is aware of the authentication back-end you use, it is a general solution from this point of view.

Furthermore, I experimented that you can avoid alias creation (that is quite ugly to me) if you can announce your samba share via Bonjour; if it is you can D&D the share without having to create the alias.