I am new to Linux and am trying my hardest to move away from Microsoft. I have installed Red Hat 9 and am wanting to use Samba, eventually as a PDC.

I dont intend to have any Windows machines on the network eventually so need to mount SMB filesystems on my linux box.

With the default installation of Red Hat 9 Samba is placed in /etc/samba. This is where I find smb.conf smbpasswd etc.

To be able to mount filesystems I need to compile samba with --with-smbmount. I cannot find the source files anywhere for samba.

I eventually installed the package from the source CD's that I got with my Red Hat distribution. This placed the Samba files withing /usr/local/samba.

I was able to configure samba and eventually mount a file system but when using 'testparm' it appears that the samba being used was /etc/samba

I feel I am missing something fundamental in linux. How would I remove the /etc/samba installation?

well with redhat you have rpm util. Tools allows you to install/uninstall applications. for the most part instructions on where to look for config files are defined at compile, or default to /etc/* with rpm you should be abel to define them at install ex. rpm -ivh samba.x.x.rpm --confdir=/etc/new-smb-conf where "/etc/new-smb-conf" is the directy.. ofcourse.