I've been scouring the web and have picked up bits and pieces, but nothing concrete on this issue. I currently have a samba server that is set up to use NIS from another server. What I'd like to do is either a) convert the ypcat password list into a smbpasswd file or b) just use smbpasswd to create entries for a few users. In other words, I want the smbpasswd file to provide passwords for smb authentication, but have samba use nis to grab the home directory information. When I try to create an entry for myself using smbpasswd -a, it reports that since the user is not in /etc/passwd, it can't create the encrypted hash entry in smbpasswd file. So my question is, how to I build/setup samba to use NIS is this method? I have compiled it with --with-nis. I also have noticed that with encrypted passwords and I compiled it with --with-pam, things don't work. This does make a certain amount of sence to me. So with encrypted passwords on there, does pam do anything useful? thanks, Michael