samba - Mar 2006 - Samba as non-root?

I have a two-part question.  Is it possible to run Samba as a non-root
user?  What we want to do, ideally, is to create a user account such as
"samba", and let our applications people log in as the samba user, and
do
all the setup and ongoing maintenance.  I looked through the stuff on
samba.org but the answer isn't readily apparent to me.  This is so they can
allow a few users the ability to view some files on a Solaris 8 server.

All the users who need read access via Samba are already in the passwd
file.  We would prefer not to use any external servers for authentication
if we can avoid it.  Can we do that?  We're trying to keep this as simple
as possible.

Thanks,
Dan

P.S.  Sorry for the disclaimer message below but I can't do anything to
stop it.



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On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 11:08 -0500, dan.franco@pnc.com
wrote:
> I have a two-part question.  Is it possible to run Samba as a non-root
> user?  What we want to do, ideally, is to create a user account such as
> "samba", and let our applications people log in as the samba
user, and do
> all the setup and ongoing maintenance.  I looked through the stuff on
> samba.org but the answer isn't readily apparent to me.  This is so they
can
> allow a few users the ability to view some files on a Solaris 8 server.
It's not possible to run Samba as non-root, mainly because some file
system operations that are done by a unprivileged Windows user require
root access under Unix.  

You can use some of Samba's share level configuration parameters such as
'valid users' or 'invalid users' and 'hosts allow' or
'hosts deny' to
implement access policies based on users or network addresses.
> All the users who need read access via Samba are already in the passwd
> file.  We would prefer not to use any external servers for authentication
> if we can avoid it.  Can we do that?  We're trying to keep this as
simple
> as possible.
The tdbsam backend (default) runs without contacting any external
servers, or a ldap server listening on localhost can be used for
authentication.  If you're going for simple, stick with the tdbsam
backend.


Tim.
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