Changing domain passwords with smbpasswd

James Willard james at whispering.org
Thu May 2 01:25:01 GMT 2002


Hello all,

I'm trying to use smbpasswd to change the password for a user who's a member
of an Active Directory domain (running in NT domain compatibility mode). The
purpose of this is to have a web interface to allow users to change their
passwords and keep track of various things like that. I had this working
previously with a -really- old version of rpcclient that still had the
'ntpass' command. I believe that rpcclient might have even been from an
early samba-tng. That broke when we went to AD, so I'm trying to use a newer
version of Samba, 2.2.3a.

Anyway, so I'm figuring that smbpasswd is what I want to change a user's
password on a remote machine. However, I've been trying with no luck to find
the magic combination of arguments to get that to work. What I tried first
was:

smbpasswd -U Admin%password -r DC user pass

... interpreting the -U and -r flags to mean the account to use to change
the password and the server to connect to, respectively. That just displays
the help page as if I have an invalid argument. I've also tried various
combinations of those using the username of the account I want to change in
the -U argument. None of the combinations I tried would allow smbpasswd to
connect to the remote server and try to change the password. What am I
missing? All I need is to be able to connect to a remote DC and change the
password for a user, preferably having the permissions of another user
(administrator rights) so that a user can change their password even if
'user cannot change password' is set in the user's policy.

Thanks,

James Willard
james at whispering.org





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