I am fairly new to the Linux world. I have to date installed the OS on multiple machines at my home, implemented a DNS server and a web server. I am however hitting a brick wall when it comes to having a domain controller. What should I be using to have both Linux workstations as well as Windows clients authenticate to a centralized domain login server? I have read that SAMBA can be utilized for the Windows clients and NIS can be used for the Linux clients. I am fuzzy about what LDAP is and how it would fit in my environment. Do I need to have these multiple services running in the mixed environment I have?

Just Samba is fine for a single server network - both Linux and Windows systems will work with it.

NIS is a UNIX technology that is essentially obsolete. Windows doesn't support NIS anyway, so you might as well just use Samba for all of the clients.

Use samba as a PDC, storing user info in LDAP. You can configure pam to use LDAP for Linux authentication, and of course your windows boxes will authenticate against the PDC. It's hard to find good documentation on how to do this, but it's a really nice setup when it's all done. Most people think LDAP is quite daunting, but it's not bad at all. Just think of it as a database, and you're storing user and group info there. This is probably the best place to start