managing users from smbpasswd rather than /etc/passwd

[Tony Nugent]

[...]

> > 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?

[...]

Thanks Eric, Andrej and Christian for your replies.  I'm starting to get a
pretty good idea of the implications and potential problems of what I was
hoping to be able to do.

It seems that there is no real practical alternative - without changing
some of the basics of how unix works - to using the /etc/passwd file for
managing user/group access, even for non-login "samba" accounts.

I need to write a series of perl scripts to generate staff lists for web
pages anyway (eg, generating html-ised phone lists etc), so it is looking
very likely now that I'll also be extending these scripts to managing (and
doing sanity checks) of /etc/passwd, /etc/smbpasswd and user home
directories and home pages.  Hmmm....

Now, there are a couple of other (minor) problems that I'm having with
things like defining the location of shares, but I'll leave this for
another message...

Thanks again.

Cheers
Tony