user authentication

[ScherBi at BAM.com]

Hello - 

I was looking for a way to use samba to authenticate users against an NT
domian.  I don't want to connect to any resource, just determine if the
uid/password pair matches what's in the domain database.

I've been able to work this out with smbclient, using -c exit, and scanning
the output to determine if the connection was succesful or not.  This has a
limitation in that I must attempt to connect to a resource to check the
uid/password pair, but the resource I use may or may not be accessible by
the user I'm trying to authenticate. I realize a dummy resoource could be
set up that everyone has access to, but I'm not confident this will work
well with over 8000 users on a distributed network.

I was hoping there was some way to just check the authentication and return
pass or fail.

While I'm asking, is there any way to get a list of the groups a user
belongs to?

Thanks,

Bill Scherer