I'm wondering what kind of programs are available for managing my network settings. At home when I plug in my laptop I'm on a workgroup. At school I'm on an Active Directory. I've got samba set up so that everything is good at home. I can browse the network, use shares, the windows machines can see and access my shares, etc.

I'd like to have some sort of automated thing so that when I'm at school I can change my settings quickly and easily to join the school's active directory so when I'm there I can browse the network, access my network drive, etc.

Is there any software available for this or am I'm going to be resigned to creating some bashscripts to automatically change out my config files and run the things I need to run to join up?

Instructions can be found at samba.org.

Basically, Samba cannot fully participate in an AD type domain. Samba can provide the same level of participation in AD as would an NT4 Lan Manager protocol machine.

I'm aware of how to join the AD domain, what I'm wondering is there an easy way to manage my credentials dependent on where I am? I.e. I log in at school, press a button it goes through everything of authenticating me, mounting drives, etc. When I'm home I hit another one and it changes everything to the way it is now? I actually think its probably going to end up simpler just making a script to handle it as I've come across no software to do it.

Suse linux has a system profile manager. It's just like the Windows profile manager. You can set up different configurations for different environments.