Some notes on one person's experience with deploying the Samba PDC appliance.

1. Deployment was to an existing Win2000 Active Directory network managed by two DCs already; applicance hosted as Ubuntu in an Oracle VirtualBox on Win7 Pro machine

2. The boot configuration screens take in domain ID and so on;

3. Using either webmin or command line "net ads join -U Administrator" failed, "host not configured as member server"

4. I noticed that there was no /etc/krb5.conf , so no Kerberos. 

5. Used package manager to install Kerberos; did a kinit of Adminstrator; still no luck

6. Using the native windows server AD admin functions, add a computer account for Samba machine's name  andm make its primary "Domain Controllers"

7. Check with "net ads testjoin"  - all's well now; oddly the step of "net ads join" was not repeated.

8. Verify the DC using nbtstat on a different network computer...it's not the master browser, and it's a BDC. 

9. Back it up

About two hours of debugging overall.  Price was right, since this is less expensive than a dedicated bare-metal solution.