Mixed Case passwords and Samba: HELP

[Werner Maes]

Hello,

Some weeks ago I reported my troubles with mixed-case passwords.
I thought that using the option "password level" would solve my
problems.
Unfortunately I have ran into difficulties.

Our students passwords are eight caracters long, with at least one
number, one
minor letter and one capital letter.
I have set "password level = 6" (since there can be a maximum of 6
capital letters).
Now I tried to logon but I did NOT work for passwords with two or more
capital
letters.

The cause?: I looked in /var/log/messages and found strange errors
there:
Apparently PAM_unix caused a lot of authentication failures (all the
passwords that are
wrong) and apparently there is a maximum number of times that pam will
try to authenticate.
This is what I think because passwords with only one capital letter work
fine (of course they also
generate some authentication failure messages).
Does anyone know whether there is a maximum number of times that PAM
tries the
authentication? Are there other modules available.
The same problem exists with the pam_pwdb.so module.

An example:
Jul  5 15:35:13 linsam2 PAM_unix[28971]: authentication failure; (uid=0)
-> m9713423 for samba service
Jul  5 15:35:36 linsam2 last message repeated 12 times

I use pam_unix.so in /etc/pam.d/samba. Does anybody whether this is
necessary for Samba
to work? (this configuration file is installed standard in Redhat) Yes,
it is necessary, without
this file it's not possible to login.
Like mentioned on previous occasions I do not use /etc/smbpasswd (too
slow for 25000 users
because it is a non-indexed file).

Another error which I cannot explain:

[root at linsam-14 samba]# smbclient -L linsam-14
******
Password:
Anonymous login successful
Domain=[STUDENT] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 2.0.7]
tree connect failed: code 0

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!


Werner Maes
KULeuven