samba passwd's

[John H Terpstra]

On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Nate Mayotte wrote:

You could find an answer to this question from google!
It comees up on this list time and again.

> Is there anyway to just take a copy of the unix system
> passwd file and copy the username and password fields into
> the smbpasswd file?

The /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow file passwords are encrypted in a way that
is totally different from the LanMan and NT passwords in
/etc/samba/smbpasswd.

Unless you can find a way to recrypt the Unix passwords the only answer we
can give (and have to live with!) is - NO!

You can consider using the "update encrypted" option in smb.conf while
temporarily living with plain text password support. See 'man smb.conf'
and look for this option.

PS: Plain text passwords will NOT work at all with NT4/2K/XP domain
member clients.

- John T.

> I know you can get it to copy all the
> usernames and places x's in the password fields, but I was
> wondering if it could copy the password field too?  I'm
> trying to get around making it so that users that want to
> use samba have to type smbpasswd in order to login.  But ,
> I think I'm pretty much stuck since samba probably uses
> different encryption than the /etc/passwd file.  Also, Is
> there any other way to reverse synchronize the two passwd
> files?  I know that if you use a pam module with NIS it
> can change them both for you when you type passwd.
>

-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org