Samba authentication

[Peter Samuelson]

  [Yves Dorfsman]
> > 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 ?

[Peter Polkinghorne <Peter.Polkinghorne at brunel.ac.uk>]
> 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).

The flat-text smbpasswd file is slated for the chopping block at some
unspecified future date.  They want to use a tdb database instead.
Which sounds just fine with me, so long as there's an easy way to
convert a .tdb to and from flat text, for manual editing.  (To that
end, I'm writing `tdbexport' and `tdbimport'.  A working tdbexport is
now in SAMBA_TNG.)

(The Other) Peter