Smbpasswd and 20.000 users

[werner maes]

Hello,

I have defined 20.000 users on a Samba-server. The samba-server
takes care of domain logons.

When several users try to authenticate at THE SAME time the server can't
follow:
only the first users can succesfully logon. When they don't logon
simultaneously
there's no problem.

For example: 20 users log on at exactly the same time. This situation
occurs in our
pc-rooms when students log on at the start of a course.
When I look at the server, I see that the cpu-idle time is 0 % when that
many users try
to connect at the same time. The clients receive an error : "The
password you supplied is
incorrect or access to the logon server has been denied".
I suspect that the reason is that our smbpasswd is quite big (2 Mb) and
for each connection
the server has to look up the user in this file to see if he's a valid
user or not.

The server is a Pentium 166 MHz. If we would user a faster server,
things would
be better, but I still fear errors when many users log on at the same
time since our
worst case scenario is that 200 users log on simultaneously (we have 9
pc-rooms).

Solution: I didn't use the smbpasswd file but I used the passwd file
instead. I have
a database version of the passwd file in /var/db/password.db. I had to
set encrypt
passwords to no and apply the registry change on Win95 to enable
plaintext passwords..

Does anyone know whether this is also possible with smbpasswd?
I mean, create a database file or any other solution.

Thanks,

Werner Maes
KULeuven