Samba and Windows 2000

[DavidAtkinson at solectron.com]

I have a copy 1.9.something running using server based auth. (It is RedHat
5.2, no updates). It still works fine, and I have yet to see a valid reason
to upgrade it. There are some very nice features in the newer version, but
the old 1.9.x release works fine. It even handles encrypted passwords. It is
good if you can upgrade, but not vital. It would however be (by me also)
highly recommended that you start using encrypted passwords.

Regards
David Atkinson.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Ts [mailto:jay at toltec.metran.cx]
Sent: Wednesday, 26 September 2001 1:51 AM
To: anette.oevreaas at i-com.no
Cc: samba-ntdom at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: Samba and Windows 2000


Anette wrote:
> 
> We have Samba 1.9.18p1 installed on our HP-Unix ver. 10.2. It was
installed
> three years ago and it has been working successfully since then. In our
> network we have NT 4.0 and W2000 Clients and Servers, besides our Samba
> server. We have just started to use W2000 and we have discovered that both
> clients and servers is not able to connect to our Samba server.

First, IMO you "should" upgrade if you want to support Windows 2000
clients.  Your version of Samba simply does not have good support for that.
It would be best, for security purposes, to run Samba as a domain
controller.  Otherwise, you'll be running your network with very
poor security at the very best.

> With NT 4.0 SP3 there was a similar problem, but by changing the
> registry, it could connect.

That would point to the issue of plaintext vs. encrypted passwords.
Old versions of Windows (Win95 and Win NT before SP3) used plaintext
passwords, happily sending them over the network for any password
sniffer program to grab.

You can change later versions of Windows to use plaintext passwords
if you want - the information is included in the Samba distribution,
in the docs directory.  Look for files called

	Win95_PlainPassword.reg
	NT4_PlainPassword.reg
	Win98_PlainPassword.reg
	WinME_PlainPassword.reg
	Win2000_PlainPassword.reg

But you'd be much better off using encrypted passwords!

> Another question I have is how an upgrade of Samba is working. Will it be
> replacing the existing version, or will it upgrade it.

If you are upgrading from the source distribution, the new files
will overwrite the old ones.  You can call that an upgrade or
a replacement.  Pick one. :)  As I recall(?) HP may include Samba
in their HP UX distribution.  Maybe they have an upgrade package
you can install(?).  That might be the simplest way to do it.

- Jay Ts
jayts at iname.com