managing users from smbpasswd rather than /etc/passwd

[Juan Carlos Castro y Castro]

>From my experience, Samba needs a login to exist in /etc/passwd in order to be
possible to have it in smbpasswd. The Unix password in /etc/passwd (or shadow)
is irrelevant, though. You might even make all Samba users un-loginnable,
shell-wise (by assigning then bogus passwords).

It should be a simple matter to write administrative shell scripts that create
a user both in /etc/passwd and /usr/blahblah/samba/blahblah/smbpasswd, then
run the smbpasswd program to assign the proper Samba password.

Hasn't anybody already written a friendly interface for that? I mean, besides
the dumb mksmbpasswd.sh, which only knows how to generate a template file from
/etc/passwd.

Xeers,
- Juan

Tony Nugent wrote:

> 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?

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