When I arrived at my current position, our environment existed almost exclusively of Windows servers. However, I am a big fan of using Linux for certain applications, like the webgallery I was asked to set up, a simple SFTP server, Nagios for monitoring etc.

I do fine setting these up, but not being the Linux expert, I am not sure how to properly join these servers to the domain and was therefor wondering what procedures or guidelines other people follow.

We often use ping -a to quickly figure out the hostname of a certain server, but this does not seem to work for the linux machines, most likely because of the whole WINS/NetBios thing I assume.

I just joined one server to the domain, but probably missed something cause it's not working even after a dnsflush. Next to that, the couple procedures I've found so far are pretty extensive and most of the time don't seem worth the time. Best case scenario, I download some kind of client (smbclient?), enter the domain name and maybe the server to use, supply an administrator password and that's it. Is that possible at all?

Thanks