samba problems in a school

[John H Terpstra]

On Friday 25 March 2005 14:54, Sean Fichera wrote:
> I have been working with samba for about 10 months now.  I am having a
> problem.  I am using SUSE 9.2 and the latest samba.  I have a PDC setup
> and machines log into a domain.  The problem is some installs work and
> some don't.  I am using a combination of things to administer samba,

What does not work?

> swat, webmin, yast, control center.

Why?

> I am trying to figure out what is 
> causing the problem.  I would like to stop using all of these different
> forms of administration but I am farily new to linux and I am not a
> programmer.  I don't know how to write a script or anything like that.
> I have hundreds of users every year to set up on various servers.  I
> have a way to do a batch setup of unix users in webmin but I don't know
> any other way to do that and I have samba setup to sync unix usernames,
> passwords, and groups.  I also need to export the list of users and
> their encrypted passwords for a backup.  So in conclusion It would be
> great if someone could help me with the following problems..

What documentation have you read? Have you read the book "Samba-3 by Example"?
It can be downloaded from: http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/Samba-Guide.pdf

The on-line version is up to date for Samba-3.0.12 (also current for 3.0.13 
released yesterday).

>
> *	What is causing the problems (and sometimes acutal changes to my
> smb.conf)

SWAT will change your smb.conf.

> *	How do I do a batch import of users?

That depends. We can help you get that organized.

> *	How do I export all users with their encrypted passwords

What password backend are you using?

	- If smbpasswd you have it in that very smbpasswd file.
	- If tdbdam, you can use pdbedit to export the data in an smbpasswd file
	- If LDAP, you can dump the contents of the LDAP directory with slapcat

So again, it all depends.

> *	How do I import users and clear text passwords (this is big - I
> need to match webmin I have made a conversion utility in MS Access that
> takes info from a student management system and convert it to the format
> I need to import in webmin)

That depends on what format the user account information is in.

>
> BTW I am using a samba password file as the backend

Which samba password file? smbpasswd or tdbsam?

>
> If anyone out there has a way to distribute policies to windows boxes
> using a policy editor (not poledit) I need to push interent settings and
> redirect my documents.  I would rather not make a profile on a
> workstation and push it up to the netlogon folder like I am doing now.
> Making changes is difficult.

Have you checked chapter 6 of "Samba-3 by Example" - it shows one way this can 
be done using a default profile.

- John T.
-- 
John H Terpstra
Samba-Team Member
Phone: +1 (650) 580-8668

Author:
The Official Samba-3 HOWTO & Reference Guide, ISBN: 0131453556
Samba-3 by Example, ISBN: 0131472216
Hardening Linux, ISBN: 0072254971
Other books in production.