passwords & smbfs mounting

[Peter Samuelson]

[Aleksandar B. Samardzic <a.samardzic at racunari.com>]
> I guess following questions are asked zillion times before, but
> someone should really fix up this
> http://us1.samba.org/listproc/samba-ntdom/ link...

I'm about this close

  |  |

to getting up off my lazy butt and adding the Samba lists to a local
mhonarc server.  What's keeping me from doing it is mostly a lack of
desire to track down, evaluate, install and configure a search engine
for it.  Anyone know one that's easy to set up?

> 1. How to create samba passwords from /etc/passwd (more than 1000
> entries there)?

smbpasswd.  It won't create passwords, just an empty smbpasswd file.
(Creating LM-encrypted passwords from DES-encrypted passwords is
supposed to be a very hard problem, mathematically speaking.)

You will have to run with encryption=no for the time being.  Samba has
a migration option (look up smb.conf for details) which lets you run
with encryption=no but whenever a user changes his password the new one 
gets stored in smbpasswd, so that you can switch to encryption=yes
later on, after everyone has changed passwords at least once.

> How to achieve synchronization between regular Unix and Samba
> password later (I know for Samba->Unix password synchronization, but
> what about reverse side)?

Assuming you use PAM (which I used to think was Linux/Solaris-specific,
until I saw it recently in HP-UX 11.00), it's a simple matter of
writing a small shared library to accomplish this -- see the PAM API --
and pointing to it in your /etc/pam.conf or /etc/pam.d/passwd file.

I don't know if this has been written.  If nobody tells me that it has,
I might invest a few hours into learning the API and doing it myself.
(My TODO list, unfortunately, greatly resembles the front half of a
FIFO.)

> 2. What is necessary to do after clean Samba TNG-2.5 installation in
> order to be able to mount Windows shares on Linux machine? I suppose
> that actually something should be done during the installation and
> I've tried to use --with-smbwrapper and --with-smbmount flags, but in
> first case compilation failed and in second case seems like nothing
> changed after applying the flag.

Try simply compiling smbmount from 2.0.7.  From what little I know of
these matters, the smbmount client and the Samba server should keep
pretty much out of each other's way.  The only issue I foresee is that
smbmount might complain about unknown parameters in smb.conf -- so
compile it with a different path for smb.conf.

Peter