Ok, so this is the background. We have had 3 SUSE Linux servers that had been residing openly on the company intranet for the last few years. These Linux servers had been joined to a Linux LDAP server managed by the company IT division. The user accounts were all managed by the company IT division. However, recent changes to policies dictated that all of our systems be taken off company-managed LDAP and Active Directory servers, placed behind a firewall, and managed by our own internal sys admins. To comply, we set up our own internal network behind the firewall and are using Active Directory for authentication. We created Active Directory accounts for all of the existing users that commonly used these Linux servers. We obviously wanted to ensure as smooth a transition as possible for the users, so when we joined the SUSE Linux servers to the new Active Directory and created the new accounts, we made certain to preserve all of the existing Linux attributes such as UID, UID Number, GID, login shell, and home directory. The user home directories are all stored on a NAS within our internal network and remote-mounted to each Linux server.