LDAP for central authentication?

[srehrlich-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (Scott Ehrlich)]

I have the following on a network:

1) RHEL 5.0 Server acting as NIS and Samba domain controller

2) CentOS 5.x machines on NIS network

3) Win XP machines on Samba domain


When I create an account for someone, I need to first type adduser
new_person -d /home/new_person then passwd new_person, then cd /var/yp
and make. ? ?Then smbpasswd -a new_person. ? Thus, two different
databases.



On another network, I have separate XP and Linux (CentOS 5.x, RHEL
5.x, and Suse) systems. ? No Samba, no NIS. ? Can I still set up a
central LDAP directory for a single account database?


For the NIS+Samba case, can I merge both credential files into a
central database using LDAP? ? I would also want to control password
length, complexity, aging, and other things.

What is the best way to do this?


Thanks.

Scott