Server Questions

[Patton Echols]

I have been using Ubuntu on my laptop for some time now.  But my office 
has stayed as a windows XP peer network. Today, the simple act of 
renaming one of the computers (changing staff) resulted in a 1/2 day 
trying to get the computers to talk to each other. <sigh>  For practical 
reasons the desktops will stay windows.

That's the background, here's what I'm thinking.

If I install a Samba file server for files, I can have a raid array to 
guard against disk failure and also to automated off site backups.

My understanding is that I can either have the samba server act as 
another peer on the windows network, or have the server also be a domain 
controller.  Having it be a domain controller is of interest because I 
have had prior problems with the existing boxes not seeing each other, 
and I am told that logging to a domain should solve that.

The real question is: what other benefits are there to having a domain 
controller?  Yes, I can authenticate users, but this is a very small 
network and security is really not that much of a problem.  So anything 
else?

Thanks for your thoughts.