Newbie question regarding Active Directory & Samba

Hi,

Not such a newbie question since I don't have all the answers.

Here is what I can tell you.
The readyNAS has two modes, one for active directory, the other for local+readycloud. There is no other LDAP mode. I believe LDAP is standard but that active directory uses some "aliases" in its config. I'm not sure smaaccountname exists on open ldap for example. So you may want to tweak your authentication provider for that.
I didn't know samba could be used as active directory, I've always seen it for file sharing et I also heard that you could push GPO-like strategies for linux with it, but for authentication I thought everyone relied on openldap to do the job, then passing parameters to samba.

A netbios name is just a name with a limited length, I don't see any reason why it should absolutely be the same as the DNS name, it's just more convenient. The DNS is something a little longer, it's tied to an infrastructure of server used for internet. To get the FQDN (fully qualified domain name) you provide the computer name and the domain name. People never add the final "." but this is DNS root, so "www.readynas.com" should be "www.readynas.com.", the root server then delegates to a "com server" and then to the server that has "readynas.com." and the IP is given for host "www". If you setup your machine as server1.internal (.internal being just the domain name), root servers won't find it and you will have to provide a DNS server that will (that's why active directory includes both DNS server and global catalog for the first server). You should be good with /etc/hosts since it's like a local DNS so with the good parameters you should have no problem.

Won't be able to help you further since I'm using active directory and don't link linux servers to it (just web applications), but Netgear has a support, I believe that helping to integrate the product is part of their role since they didn't provide an openLDAP authentication... It never hurts to ask.