Need some advice

[Jon Reynolds]

I am wanting to learn about ldap so I am trying to build a pdc with
ldap. I have finally gotten the bugs worked out on the samba pdc part
and now I want to try and use ldap as the password manager(is that the
right term?). I have O'Reilly's LDAP book and they are talking about
installing from source as opposed to a pre-rolled installer.

My question is this:

I am using FreeBSD5.1 and I want to know should I just install it using
the ports or should I go ahead and do it and the dependencies by source?
Would it benefit me more to do it by source? Also, does  FreeBSD5.1 have
support for threads?

I know these are probably lame questions but to me they are legitimate.
My ultimate goal is to have a samaba pdc with an ldap backend using
kerberos authentication. I would like to have one login for all services
i.e.fileserver,mailserver,citrixserver.

If anyone has any suggestions as to why or why not this is a good idea I
would be interested to hear them as well.

Thanks for any suggestions,

Jon