Hello Basso, We've seen some problems with timing on HP-UX with NIS and Samba that look similar. Don't have a handle on it yet. But a couple of things to check - make sure that you have a process running called pwgrd; looks something like: root 1547 1 0 07:46:40 ? 0:04 /usr/sbin/pwgrd This is used to speed up lookups via hash tables, etc. Also, the gid -2 error you are getting is probably because you haven't defined a guest account = xxxxxxx in your smb.conf file; if you do not assign this to a dummy user in /etc/passwd, then it will default to using the nobody account, who has a uid/gid of -2; and samba is NOT good with handling uid/gid's that are negative, and will cause problems. I use the following; in global section of smb.conf: guest account = pcguest in /etc/passwd: pcguest:*:277:20:sambauser::/bin/false Hope this helps, Don -----Original Message----- From: Basso Viviana-avb012 [mailto:Viviana_Basso-avb012@email.mot.com] Sent: Friday, November 03, 2000 11:44 AM To: samba@us5.samba.org Subject: (no subject) Hi everybody! I'm having an anoying problem with Samba. This is the scenario: Unix HP-UX 10.20 Authentication through NIS Samba Server 2.0.3 NT 4 (SP5) or Windows 2000 clients. Situation: Once in a while one of the users can't map their directory at the samba server. It keeps asking user and password (it shouldn't because the configuration we have never ask for those). Even though the users enter their Unix names and passwords they aren't able to connect. The problem gets pretty awful when a user has to reset his/her machine. At next logon his/her NT 4 /Windows 2000 gets locked and they can't log in their Windows accounts. This doesn't seem to happen for on particular reason. We couldn't re-create this error. The smbd.log gives me these two messages for every refused connection [2000/11/03 13:17:25, 0] smbd/uid.c:(104) Couldn't set effective gid to -2 currently set to (real=0,eff=0) [2000/11/03 13:17:25, 0] smbd/service.c:(425) Can't become connected user! I have no idea of what's the reason for the account locked and all that. Can anybody help me??? Thank you, ------------------------------------------------------- Viviana V. Basso GTSS - CS Unix Regional Support Motorola Argentina S.A. Email: avb012@email.mot.com