NIS and Samba - can't authenticate Windows 98 clients

[Clive Menzies <clive@clivemenzies.co.uk>]

Hi

I've been round in several circles in the last 24 hours without success.
Looking through the docs and googling provided numerous ideas as to the
source of the problem but various fixes failed to sort this particular
problem:

I've recently set-up a network with 3 servers running NFS and Samba.  By
synchronising the users of these and 3 clients (running Debian, MacOSX
and Windows between them) all could access files on the servers
according to permissions and ownership.  

NIS would be a more elegant solution and so I have designated 
one server as the NIS server and set it up accordingly.  AFAICT this
works fine on the Linux side - tested it by removing one user from one 
of the other servers and relied on NIS to authenticate access. So far 
so good - I didn't even have to configure the NIS client; it just seemed 
to work out of the box ;-)

The problem arises when booting the same client into windows98 - it
doesn't seem to find the NIS server to validate the user. Relevant parts
of the smb.conf are as follows:

# set local master to no if you don't want Samba to become a master
# browser on your network. Otherwise the normal election rules apply
   local master = yes

# Windows Internet Name Serving Support Section:
# WINS Support - Tells the NMBD component of Samba to enable it's WINS
# Server
   wins support = yes

I've tried various settings on the windows client including the NT
network setting.  I have a limited understanding of networking in
general and Windows in particular.

Some guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks

Clive