Permission denied problem

[Mark Rinaudo]

I'm currently trying to setup a PDC for a mixture of WIN 2K 
servers,clients Win 98/95 machines.  Currently i'm using
samba 2.2.2-9 on  a Debian Sid box.  Samba works great for shares.  I'v 
followed the PDC how to and manually added a machine with the following 
$ appended and added the machine to the smbpasswd file with the -m 
option.  When trying to join a Win 2k SP1 server to the domain  I get a 
Error Permission Denied on opening the /etc/samba/smbpasswd file.  This 
seems to be some sort of generic error message which isn't too helpful 
to me.  I've been trying to find someone else with the same problem but 
all i found was "check the directory permissions" which on my box the 
root is the owner(of smbpasswd)  and can read it.  Samba runs as root. 
This is my last resort  Any help would be great. I would like to end 
this with a thanks to the developers for samba keep up the good work!

                                                                        
                                                                        
            Mark Rinaudo
P.S. Kernel 2.4.6
        Samba 2.2.2-2
        Samba-common 2.2.2-2