Problems with Authenticating Samba shares.

[Shawn Bolsover +44 116 2561561 ext 2375]

Help,

We have a Sun Sparc running Solaris 2 which has Version 1.9.18p3 of Samba.

The problem is that when the Samba Server is selected in the network
neighbourhood on an NT box , it now asks for a username and password. This
doesn't matter who the user is , if you enter 
the valid username and password for the account you are using,  the NT box asks
you again to authenticate.

The smb.conf file has entries so that samba uses the NT server to do its
authentication for connecting to shares.

ie.

Password server =  <NT SERVER>

security = server

We have followed your diagnostics.txt file closely but have not found anything
obvious wrong.

We have observed in the ../samba/var directory relevant log files which seem to
suggest that
when authentication is undertaken to connect to samba shares the password
server is asked to authenticate but some how this fails. The message,"disabling
password server" is recorded and then samba default to looking for a smbpasswd
file in ../samba/private.

We have not left this file  in place as we were using the NT box to
authenticate and keeping 
Unix passwords and NT passwords in sink is not easy.

We attempted to create this passwd file from the passwd file on the Unix box
using mksmbpasswd.sh, this created the file. 

When we reinitialise samba and tried the test again, the log file displayed new
messages saying
that the passwords didn't match, defaulting to Lanman from NT. Suspect this
file creates passwords with lanman OWF not NT's, probably why there is a
problem in this case.

Note this was meant as a temporary get out which didn't work.

This system was working up until yesterday dinner time, and for some reason
which I cannot account for the authentication to samba shares stopped
functioning.

Note.

We tried all the easy fixes such checking for rouge processes starting and
stopping samba, even rebooted Unix and NT machines.

There maybe an easy solution, but I would appreciate advice.

I am in the unenviable position in that an NT network belonging to a project is
now none functional due to this problem. This system was setup by a colleague
who is away on holiday and cannot be contacted.

I hope that you can respond fairly quickly.

Many Thanks

Regards

Shawn Bolsover
Senior Network Engineer
GEC-Marconi
Leicester 
England