I'm thinking on following lines:

My office desktop is RHL9. The default in office is Win2k and Domain logins. Mine is the only linux box.

1. I want to allow people to share with me transparently. Guess proper samba configuration should do. I should be able to access there shares and mount them on logging in (and umount on logout). They should be able to access my shares with their domain logins (should not need a RHL9 login) and I should be able to set permissions based on their domain logins.

2. They should be able to login in my desktop with their domain logins (RHL authenticating them to Windoz domain server and automatically creating a home directory, if none exists in appropriate places)

What are the options to achieve these? This will allow for selective migration of user desktops to Linux (on appeal basis - as people liked my desktop look and feel and want to have it - most never worked on linux or even *nix)

I think you'll find that Samba can do everything that you want. If you haven't used Samba before, you may want to take the time to read the 'howto' at the Linux Documentation Project. <http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SMB-HOWTO.html>

You don't say how many are in your workgroup, but I think that from both an administration and data security point of view, you would be much better off using a (Linux) file server. This can be an ordinary PC - RAID and a tape backup are recommended.

The alternative is to set up LOTS of imported shares - this can be an administrative nightmare if you have a lot of people in the workgroup. If you were to set up a public directory on a file server, things would be much simpler.

Hope this helps.

Don't know if Samba can do the second option (or complete first if I don't want my workstation to mirror Windoz Domain Server logins). Correct me if I'm wrong in this approach. This reminds me of Novell's neat way of centralized authentication mechanisms.

For note, I don't have any control over other machines in my network (nothing except my workstation) and I want to behave exactly as a Win 2k Client would behave in terms of machine access and sharing etc.