Machine accounts is smbpasswd file.

[CURRIE KEVIN]

This was posted a while ago, I'm going to repost it here for reference.

<REPOST>
FYI: One thing that has changed is the definition of
what is a 'machine' account in smbpasswd. Luke's NTDOM
branch had a ':080:' field that encoded the account type,
I have now changed this in the main branch to be an ASCII
encoded :[W]: field (see the source for details, I haven't
had time to write everything up for the docs).

As any account ending in '$' is automatically treated
as a workstation account even if it doesn't have the
magic [W] field then old NTDOM smbpasswd files should
still work ok - but you might want to note the change
for future reference.
</REPOST>


	I have been unable to get a machine account to work without have
the name end in a $.  Could someone reply with a sample account not using
the $ but using [W] so that I can see what it looks like?

	Second, I have a question as too a good way to accomplish a task.
We want to have a smbpasswd file that contains user accounts from our
entire campus NIS+ database.  We will eventually have several labs
authenticating to samba as a PDC.  Each of these labs will be managed by
different people, who should not have access to the smbpasswd file.  We
want these people to be able to add machine accounts w/o intervention of a
super user who has access to the smbpasswd file.  We were thinking of
having seperate smbpasswd files (one for the NIS+ users, and seperate ones
for the labs) and then having a cron scripts periodically smush them
together.  The NIS+ smbpasswd file will have to be updated along w/ the
NIS+ passwords, we can take care of this.  My question is how can I get
smbpasswd to recogonize separate smbpasswd files, especially if smbpasswd
isn't going to be run by root to change passwords for machine accounts?
Would compiling several copies of smbpasswd for each separate file and
then calling the appropriate binary be the best solution.  Will it work at
all?

thanks,
Kevin Currie