[Samba] Exclamation point (!) in password

Nico Kadel-Garcia
Thu, 07 Oct 2021 12:31:35 -0000

On Thu, Oct 7, 2021 at 7:36 AM Tobias Kirchhofer via samba
<samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> recently we updated our Samba AD and Samba fileserver to
4.15.0-SerNet-RedHat-4.el8 and discovered a problem with a user wanted to
connect to a samba share from a current macOS. The user has a exclamation point
(!) at the very end of the password string. Samba disagrees with that and
replies with an authentication error.
>
> Testwise we changed the ?!? to the penultimate character and the logon
works again.

If the "!' is in automatic scripting, rather than manual logging in,
it may be your scripts interpreting it as syntactic sugar. If it's
showing up even in manual logging in, then that *does* sound like a
bug in Samba!

I will point out that the "Gotta put in special characters"
requirement is fairly nonsensical, based on some ancient guidelines
when password length was restricted to only 8 characters or so and
dictionary attacks were easy. But these days, training every piece of
password managing software in the world to correctly handle Unicode
and syntactic sugar like $, !, #, ;, :, /, and @ is an incredible pain
in the keister., much more easily and robustly handled by using longer
passwords or passphrases without these problematic requirements.

See the old XKCD cartoon for mockery about just how silly it got.