Hello 
I feel this post is probably outside the scope of 'help the new guy' but it is sooooh completely newbie-ish that I am posting here - thanks for your patience.
Firstly, I am not an IT guy at all. I work as a technician for a small company that uses a lot of PCs for testing equipment. I have all the PCs connected together as a windows workgroup (I think.) In other words, they are all plugged into a switch along with an ADSL router. So they all access the internet happily.
However, they only access each other if I create an identical account on each PC with an identical username and identical password. Obviously this is far from ideal.
As I understand it, this is where Linux & Samba excel
I understand that samba works well as a primary domain controller. However, even at this very first step I am having great difficulty in getting my head around the concept of what a 'domain' really is.
I can see that it is a group of connected PCs/ boxes - whether they be connected via the net or locally, but, does the domain have to be a physical entity such as a registered dot com address or could it be something as simple as a static IP - or am I so completely misunderstanding this that I have even this all wrong....?
Help
and thank you
I feel this post is probably outside the scope of 'help the new guy' but it is sooooh completely newbie-ish that I am posting here - thanks for your patience.
Firstly, I am not an IT guy at all. I work as a technician for a small company that uses a lot of PCs for testing equipment. I have all the PCs connected together as a windows workgroup (I think.) In other words, they are all plugged into a switch along with an ADSL router. So they all access the internet happily.
However, they only access each other if I create an identical account on each PC with an identical username and identical password. Obviously this is far from ideal.
As I understand it, this is where Linux & Samba excel
I understand that samba works well as a primary domain controller. However, even at this very first step I am having great difficulty in getting my head around the concept of what a 'domain' really is.
I can see that it is a group of connected PCs/ boxes - whether they be connected via the net or locally, but, does the domain have to be a physical entity such as a registered dot com address or could it be something as simple as a static IP - or am I so completely misunderstanding this that I have even this all wrong....?
Help
and thank you 
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