How to use only the UNIX password file with samba ?

[eirvine]

Hi Florent,

Florent Boucher wrote:
> 
> Dear colleges,
> we are planning to use sambe in place of our NT PDC.
> So we have define samba to be a logon server for windows and it works. The
> security option is user in order to use the UNIX/NIS password file. The only
> problem we have for the moment is to change the password from the windows tool
> box.
> This option works only if we define the user in the smbpassword file located in
> /usr/local/samba/private.
> We do not like this option as we would like to have only one password file, the
> file coming with the NIS.
> So is it possible to tell samba to change only the NIS password file only when a
> request is made from windows. We don not want that samba look for the file
> smbpassword as we are not planning to maintain this file.
> Thank you for a precise answer.
> Florent

If you want your SAMBA server to be the PDC (which is what you want, as
far as I
can make out), and if you are using NT SP3 or above, then you HAVE to
use 
the smbpasswd file and you have to use encrypted passwords.
 
I was very reluctant to go down this path myself. However, in practice
is not as big a deal as I expected.
 
I have also made up a web/cgi interface for users to change their
password.
Using expect, it changes both their unix and smb passwords.
 
Eddie.