Adding Windows machines to a Mac network

[Cooners]

Hi

 

One of the schools I'm working with has a mainly mac setup with macbooks and a mac snow leopard server, however due to the cost of macs they now have got 30+ windows machines. The macs are all managed from the mac server and I'm happy with the way that works, however we need to control the windows machines. We have a windows server 2008 r2 server currently being used as a file server, I've found loads of articles about adding a mac server to a windows domain but is there a way to add the windows server to the mac domain (or whatever they call it on a mac). What I want is to leave the files etc where they are as everything is working really well with the macs and I don't want to mess that up so I just want the windows server to handle group policy and leave the mac server deal with log ins etc, if that isn't possible then is there any way to import the mac open directory over without causing to much chaos.

[iSteve]

On 10.6 you can enable Windows file services and the machine can act as an NT4 style PDC (so will allow your Windows PCs to join you 'domain' and log in). Only thing you will be missing is Group Policy MMC, but you could manage settings with .reg files run through a login script - this might not be practical though depending on how many settings you want to manage on Windows.