Hello,
I am having a very small network with Windows Server 2003 as the primary domain controller and using Active Directory for authenticating users. I have got one computer on the network which is running Windows XP Professional (which has already joined the Windows Server 2003 domain) and another system running Debian Linux v3.1 (Sarge) which I installed very recently to work as a web server in my small network.

Now, to join my Debian Linux box also into the domain I know that I need to install Samba with which I am not much aware. I tried going through the Samba official doc but it was confusing me a lot and I felt like it was too much of information for me. I really hope that you experts could help me with this problem.

One of my questions is after installing Samba will I also need to copy the user accounts manually in Debian Linux from Windows Server 2003 Active Directory or Samba will take care of creating the user accounts automatically? Will I also be required to install anything extra software on my Windows Server 2003 for Samba to connect?

Also, in my Windows Server 2003 system, when done with the installation and without thinking much ahead of time I had selected to raise the domain functional level to Windows Server 2003. Could this by any chance cause any problem or conflict with Samba?

So, can anyone please answer me for the above questions and help me configure Samba in my Debian Linux as client to join Windows Server 2003 domain.

Thanks in advance.

Try this somewhat shorter tutorial:

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/340

thanks for the quick reply. I went through the link you sent to me and followed the complete instructions as told. At the end even when i ran the command: net ads testjoin i got the success message saying "Join is OK". But when i ran the command wbinfo -u or wbinfo -g i get the error message saying Error looking up domain users.

Can you please tell me where could be the problem? and i even tried to login using one of the user accounts in Windows Server 2003 in Debian Linux, but it didn't work. I couldn't understand why???

Thanks again..

It sounds to me like an error in the Windows 2003 server setup. Did you follow the link in that section to make sure your server is setup properly?

Please also note, that although I'm trying to help you, I've never actually set one of these up myself... Don't want to mislead you into thinking I'm some sort of guru!