managing users from smbpasswd rather than /etc/passwd

[Tony Nugent]

I have samba installed on a web server (behind a firewall).  It's working
fine with all the WINS networking here (eg, password authentication from
the NT servers, etc).

I (we) want this web server - a linux redhat 5.x box currently running
samba-1.9.18p8 - to have as few actual unix login accounts as possible.

What I want/need to do is to allow LOTS of people in the faculty here
"network neighbourhood" read/write access on this machine for the purpose
of managing:

(1) their own home web page
(2) unit/subject areas (which more than one person may need to have write
    access to)
(3) specific subject/unit areas in /home/ftp

I would much rather do this without touching /etc/passwd at all.

So, my question is...

Is it possible to specify user/group IDs and home directories for samba to
use for specific (NT-server authenticated) users from the smbpasswd file
alone?

Or am I restricted to using /etc/passwd for this sort of management, with
disabled unix login password fields and /bin/false as a login shell for
these users?

Cheers                                                         .
Tony  __________  Tony Nugent            >> - Linux -  <<  _--_|\
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