[Samba] auth against unix accounts

[Jason Balicki]

wolfgang pauli <> wrote:
> I am wondering how I can tell samba to auth against the linux accounts
> without needing to add the users to with "smbpasswd -a username". I
> thought this is easy but I can't make it.

You can't do this very easily.  The reason you need a seperate
user authentication is because the passwords from the windows
clients are sent to the server in hashed ("encrypted") form.
There is no way of reversing this hash to match against the
linux shadow password entry.

So, you have two choices to handle this simply:

1)  Use smbpasswd (recommended, it's not that difficult
to set up and it's worth it.)

2)  Disable encrypted passwords on your windows clients.
I don't even know if this is possible on Win2k and up,
but I don't recommend it at all.  Passwords will be
sent in cleartext over the wire.

HTH,

--J(K)