Does anyone know how big of a network samba can handle.

I don't think samba itself will be the limiting factor.

You should probably be looking into things like:

* what will the samba server be doing (sharing files or just handling windows logins)

* what kind of files will the server be handling (filesize)

* network bandwidth being taken up by the server

* do you want just one samba server for a large scale network (single point of failure)


On a large scale network with just one samba server, I think the main bottlenecks would be:
* network bandwidth
* disk access
* processor load

cool thats what I wanted to hear. I was thinking of using it for things like dhcp, fileserver and authenticating.