Smbpasswd and 20.000 users

[David Collier-Brown]

werner maes wrote:
> I have defined 20.000 users on a Samba-server. 
> When several users try to authenticate at THE SAME time the server can't
> follow: only the first users can succesfully logon.

> I suspect that the reason is that our smbpasswd is quite big (2 Mb) and
> for each connection
> the server has to look up the user in this file to see if he's a valid
> user or not.

	Yup! It's a timing problem.  Another university had
	it too, and diagnosed it as such: you can simulate
	it with a bunch of smbclients running parallell.

> Solution: I didn't use the smbpasswd file but I used the passwd file
> instead. I have
> a database version of the passwd file in /var/db/password.db. I had to
> set encrypt
> passwords to no and apply the registry change on Win95 to enable
> plaintext passwords..
> 
	Putting the password file into dbm obviously is
	the correction!  So would be a dbm version of
	the samba password file.

	Personally (I have a bias, see below), I'd leave
	the passwords in the dbm'd /etc/password and
	put a copy of the plain-password .reg files in a
	passwordless share and in people's logon.bat files.

--dave
[ The Windows encrypted-password scheme is necessary 
  but not sufficient on the internet, but just silly on 
  private nets. Since all the  data is sent in plain text 
  anyway, you need firewalls and VPNs for any use of smb]
--
David Collier-Brown in Boston
Phone: (781) 442-0734, Room BUR03-3632