O'Reilly has put their Using Samba book on line. This is a truly great resource that you should explore in detail. It is very well written and current.

Some things you can do with Samba:

You can set a number of parameters in the logon.bat. Remember: the logon.bat has to be a dos file! Here is what mine looks like:

net time \\master /set /yes
net use H: /home
net use N: \\master\Netscape /yes

The first line sets the windows computer clock to the samba server's time. You also need to add this line to the smb.conf file in the [global] section to make it happen:

time server = yes

The second line in the logon.bat makes the H drive on the windows computer be your home directory on the linux server. This is in addition to the profile directory be automatically synched. Again, you have to add a line to the smb.conf file in the [global] section:

logon home = \\master\%U

where \\master is the name of the samba server.

The last line in my logon.bat sets drive letter and automatically mounts my netscape profiles resource.  When you first create a profile in Netscape in windows - using Netscape's profile manager - you can tell it where to put all the user's files. By using a share on your linux server, you can have your Netscape profile follow you from computer to computer in windows. You will have to add a section to the smb.conf file to make this happen. Here is what I have in mine to support this:

[Netscape]
 comment = Netscape Profiles
 path = /backup/netscape
 read only = no

And if you want to get real fancy, make a link from the bookmarks.html in your linux home directory on the server to the directory samba is sharing. In my case it will look like this - all on one line:

ln -s /home/jpollman/.netscape/bookmarks.html /backup/netscape/jpollman/bookmark.htm

Now, whether I am using Netscape in Linux or Windows, I am using the same bookmark file.

Some thoughts on drive letters - before you get too carried away.  We use "U:" for USER, but "H:" is common and typically symbolizes "Home".  Go for things that are easy to remember in any other share, "F:" for family, "N:" for Netscape, "T:" for Team, "P:" for public, etc.  That makes it easy for you to explain to the intended audience and easy for them to remember.  Those conventions are common in the Novell environment.

Note: Avoid "Z:" if you'll have Win9x machines logging into your box.  Z:
gets mapped to NETLOGIN by default and mapping things to it in the logon.bat file will cause a prompt y/n dialog with the user -- answering "Yes" to remap the resource to Z will fail anyway =)  WinNT machines do not have that same limitation.

You can also map LPT ports in the login.bat file:

net use LPT2: \\master\{name of printer share}

Hint: Always start at LPT2: in case the user has a local printer, or other device attached to LPT1:  We've mapped upto 9 printers to our networked PCs.  This allows you to add the printer as if it were physically connected to your machine.  That'll help if the printer isn't specifically supported by
Linux (Lexmark 3200) and you'll get full control over it's options at each workstation -- each user can have different document defaults!

If the logon.bat is having problems and goes by too fast to see what is going on, put in a line that says just:

    pause

This will stop the batch file until you hit enter.