Samba authentication

[Peter Polkinghorne]

Yves Dorfsman said:
> Hi,
> Could someone confirm that the following is NOT possible with Samba:
> -Run Samba on a Solaris box WITH NO SMBPASSWD
> -Have the users log in on Windows NT, using the Novell NDS client, and
>  using ENCRYPTION
> -Have the users authenticated by Samba through NDS (preferred) or NIS.
>
> My understanding is that if Samba receives the password encrypted, it
> has no choice but to use a local smbpasswd (and can't use /etc/passwd,
>  NDS, NIS, pam etc...). Right ?

Yes that is correct - but IIRC from scanning the code, the SMB passwd stuff
is carefully separated and could be extended to use other mechanisms (which
I would like, since a flat text file is not good for a large number of
servers and users).

>
> My understanding is that with the current version of Win NT, you
> cannot disable password encryption. Right ?
>
NT 4.0 can disable encryption as can W2K - afterall Microsoft does have this
burden of backward compatability :-).

> Do you know what are the alternatives (totalnet Syntax ? others ?) ? 

The only serious competitor for Samba is Microsoft in my view - the Sun
PC Netlink (IIRC) is based on NT 4.0 source code - so a dead end.  Might
be OK if just want a blackbox fileservice solution - but not OK for combined
NFS/SMB fileservice.


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| Peter Polkinghorne, Computer Centre, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH,|
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