samba - Dec 2004 - Connecting Windows with plaintext password - HOW?

Hello!

Because of some reasons it is required that plaintext-passwords shall be used
in a WorkGroup network. This works fine with Samba 2.0.6 from all Windows
clients (NT4...XP).

A newly added server (SuSE 9.2 and Samba 3.0.7) should be configured the same
way, but it does not work. I can see no failures in the smb.conf, and I am
able to mount this server with smbclient without any problem, but when a
windows box tries to connect, I get a smb_pam_auth failure.

Meanwhile I spent multiple days to get this working. As a WORKAROUND, I
currently changed the setup to encrypted passwords and added the most
important users a second time with smbpasswd, and this works, but it is NOT
ACCEPTABLE that I must do all this work twice.

The problem must reside somewhere at authentificating the user against
/etc/passwd and /etc/shadow when talking to Windows-Clients. Maybe, this great
Samba 3 has "forgotten" how plaintext passwords work?


It is really no fun to get such "helpful" hints from everywhere, as to
simply
switch to encrypted passwords. I do have my reasons why I do not use them
(would fill a long list) and I also know that this definitely worked with
Samba 2.0.6 (and still works with it), so it must be a failure inside Samba
3.0.7. Because Samba 2 will not be included in newer Linux distros, I must
get it working with Samba 3, too.


Hope that someone will leave me useful hints. -- Thanks!

mfg

  Ing. Rainer Hantsch