Password problems (sync, Windows, case)--SOLVED

[Oren Levy]

This helped A LOT! I tried your chat string, but it didn't work for me. They
key was setting passwd chat to match the dialog that passwd uses. I compared
the passwd prompts with the default passwd chat string...and there is one
tiny difference. Passwd says "Retype..." but the passwd chat string says
"ReType..." Changing smb.conf to have the lower-case 't' allows users to set
the password with smbpasswd. (FYI, I have Red Hat 7.0, Samba 2.2a3)

(Note: I still get the error "Failed to open /etc/secrets.tdb" though.)

Turning to Windows, I again tried to change the (Microsoft Networking)
password but it didn't work. It turns out that when changing the password
you must enter the old password in all upper case letters regardless of what
the actual password is. Using all caps works (for the old password.) I
suspect I could get this to work with both upper and lower case letters by
changing the settings in smb.conf but the warnings in smb.conf are daunting.

I can't believe I enjoy solving these sorts of things.  Thanks for your
help!!

-----Original Message-----
From: moser at egu.schule.ulm.de [mailto:moser at egu.schule.ulm.de]
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2001 1:11 AM
To: Oren Levy
Cc: samba at samba.org
Subject: Re: Password problems


Hello,

Oren Levy wrote:

> Something really weird is going on. Users cannot change their password
using
> smbpasswd. They get this:
>
> Failed to open /etc/secrets.tdb
> Old SMB password:
> New SMB password:
> Retype new SMB password:
> machine 127.0.0.1 rejected the password change: Error was : The specified
> password is invalid.
> Failed to change password for [ ]

I had the same problem after the upgrade from "samba-2.0.7" to
"samba-2.2.0". Our users were no longer able to change their passwords
via Windows' password changing dialogue (Win95, Win98) as well as via
"smbpasswd".

I did some tests and found out that the problem only appears when using
"unix password sync = yes". But we need this feature and it ran quite
well before the upgrade. We didn't have to set "passwd chat" before, it
worked (using 2.0.x) without any problems using the default "passwd
chat" (samba is running on SuSE Linux 6.3 and uses "/usr/bin/passwd"
(with option "%u") that came with the SuSE distribution to change the
user's unix password).

Then I tried to set a "passwd chat" which fits to the dialogue that our
"/usr/bin/passwd" uses. After that I was able to change the password (as
non-root) via "smbpasswd" and via Windows's dialog again!

So I think (if you use "unix password sync") you can try to set a
"passwd chat" manually. Perhaps it solves your problem, too.

The string that I have set looks like:

  passwd chat = New* %n\n *password* %n\n *changed*

I haven't had enough time to do further investigation, yet. I am sure
that this line was not necessary before the upgrade. ;-)

> I can log in fine
> I can change user passwords with root fine

AFAIK when changing passwords as "root", the "unix password sync" is not
done.

> I can share printers
> I can share folders

Yes - the other functions (that we use) of samba are running well.

I hope that I could help you!

Best regards,
Steffen