When the world was young, Sandie carved some runes like this:
> Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 10:23:24 -0600
> From: shui@yxepna01.pointsnorth.com
> To: samba@anu.edu.au
> Subject: Newbie to Samba
[snip]> 1. Samba keeps it own set of password in private/smbpasswd after Samba
> was installed. What's the use of those passwords? Are they being used
to
> perform validation if "Password required" is specified in
smb.conf for
> using a particular service?
Samba only uses the smbpasswd file if you configure it to use
encrypted passwords. The samba default is no encryption, while the
windoze default is to use encrypted passwords. So, you either have
to set up samba to use encrypted passwords (probably need to
compile samba from source) or set windoze to use cleartext
passwords via a registry key (see the win95.txt and encryption.txt
files in the samba docs).
If you use the cleartext passwords, then you needn't worry about
the smbpasswd utility (it's only used with encrypted passwords).
As far as sync-ing passwords, I don't know. The win95 password
applet in Control Panel will change the passwords (at least some of
them) in the local windoze password file that it stores on disk
(*.pwl) in the windoze directory. However, these changes may or
may not propagate back to an NT or samba server (since I don't have
access to NT or 98, I can't verify stuff there). The easiest way
for a user to change their samba password is to login (via telnet,
ssh, etc) and change it themselves. I think PAM can be set to
force periodic changes (you said you have a Sun box, right?).
It gets to be non-trivial when changing windoze passwords on a
regular basis. You may have to manually delete the old .pwl file
from the windoze client after the samba host password is changed.
Hope this helps, Steve Arnold
******************************************************************
Stephen L Arnold sarnold@earthling.net
Conserving bandwidth (and bellybutton lint)
