If you were to log in, you'd be able to get more information on your fellow community member.
The normal NT/Samba integration misery is to do with plaintext passwords: Samba wants them (NT has two different password hashes, neither of which is equivalent to the Unix one, so the "secure" authentication scheme in NT can't be used with Samba unless you generate a new set of password hashes). The Samba documentation (docs/ENCRYPTION.txt) has an explanation of this and how to fix NT (with an obscure registry tweak, of course) to transmit plaintext passwords. If this bothers you on a security basis, you can get tools to keep password hashes in both formats for Unix.
The other problem is getting two machines to find one another. This is a perpetual mystery to me, but the things which seem to work most often are (1) referencing machines by IP address ("\\192.168.0.42\home") and (2) putting the IP addresses of interesting machines in an LMHOSTS file, then importing it in Control Panel (and rebooting, of course).
I've managed to get this to work in a large heterog...
I've done this, though not quite in the way suggested (the FastCGI thing sounds like a hack, in particular). Apache + mod_perl + DBI + DBI::Pg + postgresql works fine. That said, the project I've developed on this will be migrated to MySQL, since (roughly speaking) it's mainly SELECTs and the overhead of having a "proper" database is undesirable.
I don't know much about Tcl, other than a lasting (and irrational) dislike engendered by the ugly "make xconfig" tool in the Linux kernel source. So I can't comment on how to do things this way. But the perl interface is quite neat (you can even make it object oriented, though I would question whether you would want to do this in many case.
Exim is also my mailer of choice (for my home configuration, which is quite complicated; for simple configurations, well, sendmail comes with RedHat, so why bother changing it).
Exim has a bunch of advantages:
- Actually written with some thought about security, so no "comedy" rootshell security holes
- Configuration files that don't look like line noise[1]
- Comes complete with an excellent filtering tool, which you can use to do some things most MTA's can't do in a tightly integrated fashion (an obvious example is to fork a message; an example of a situation in which you might want to do this is to short-circuit delivery of mail to a user's local maildrop, but also kick it out onto your ISP's relay so that it can get to them if they're not home at the moment. That's actually what the example below is for.)
- Perl bindings (though not, unfortunately, as general as...
Oh... and about your "great unsolved problem" -- this sounds to me like a problem with the upstream relay. There's no reason that I shouldn't be able to emit mail from, say, "chris@ex-parrot.com", into "relay.some-service-provider.net", so long as I am doing so from "some-machine.some-service-provider.net" (i.e., a machine for which relaying is permitted through that host). The fact that the message From: line is not "someone@somewhere.some-service-provider.net" should not be relevant.