password stuff

[Stephen L Arnold]

Greetings All:

I hope everyone had a fun Halloween weekend (I carved 4 big 
pumpkins and gave out a bucket full of rubber eyeballs and stuff).

I'm hoping somebody can explain the password behavior I've been 
seeing (and a couple of other things).  Here's my setup:

An isolated LAN (most clients have modems for dialling out) with 
one linux/samba machine (RedHat 4.2, kernel 2.0.30, samba 1.9.18p8) 
and ~20 win95 (OSR/2.1) clients.  We used to have Netware 4.11 
until the new PC/lan guy decided we didn't it any more (our old 
server now runs win95 -ugh).  Most clients now run NetBEUI and 
TCP/IP (except for the PC/lan guy, who's afraid of everything).  
Some still have the (now useless) IPX/SPX stack loaded; when I 
removed it from some of the clients, we got this "Netware shell is 
not available" error which takes a little effort to get rid of, so 
he just left the IPX stack loaded on most of the machines.

Anyway, I've given everyone accounts on my linux box (with the same 
user names as their win95 machine names), but the PC/lan guy won't 
let me enable PDC, browse master, or WINS stuff.

Question 1)  Why am I the only one who can browse the samba shares 
without entering a password?  Here's what I think (please give me 
some feedback).  When we had Netware, everyone was set to Network 
Login.  Now, some people still have it set (but there's nothing to 
validate the login), while others have it set to Windows Login.  
AFAIK, I'm the only one who uses their linux password as the 
Network Login password for windoze (and that's why I can browse the 
samba shares without entering a password again).  Would that be 
more or less correct?  Also, when others try and load an html doc 
on the linux box (from windoze), it won't work until they browse 
there and enter their password.  When I get my other linux box up, 
this one will be running Apache, but for now the html docs are just 
static (which should take care of the latter behavior?).

Question 2)  It doesn't happen on my windoze box (of course), but 
on most everyone else's machine, windoze launches the autodial box 
(either MS or Netscape) when they try and telnet to the linux box.  
Anyone know how to stop it from doing that?  Something in the TCP 
keys in the registry perhaps?

Question 3)  What would be the advantage of making samba the browse 
master?  It seems like we're always having little network problems 
now with NetBEUI (where IPX was very stable), eg, machines and 
shares randomly disappear and then reappeared later, or some 
machines can see some resources but not others, while other 
machines can see things the first group can't.  I get the feeling 
that windoze sends a lot of unnecessary network traffic, and when 
something doesn't respond right away, clients hang, etc (I may be 
ignorant, but a network design that allows one goofy client to take 
down other clients seems like a bad thing).

I'm no expert, but I get the feeling that if I enabled some of the 
samba features, things would get better, such as security (PDC 
stuff), browsing (browse master stuff), and WINS.  Can anyone give 
me some arguments to present to the PC/lan guy (or my boss) on why 
it would be better to use those samba features?

Thanks in advance, Steve Arnold


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Stephen L. Arnold                        Senior Systems Engineer
ENSCO Inc.                        email:  arnold.steve at ensco.com
P.O. Box 5488                         www:  http://www.ensco.com
Vandenberg AFB, CA  93437             voice: 805.734.8232 x68838
                                               fax: 805.734.4779
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