migrating to encrypted passwords

[Herb Lewis]

Sentient Organism wrote:
> 
> I have an old Samba network that uses unencrypted passwords. At the time,
> the posts were running win95. These days they are running win98 for the
> most part, but introducing new machines onto the network means fiddling
> with the EnablePlainTextPassword registry key.
> 
> So currently, all the machines use plain-text passwords. I want to modify
> them all to use encrypted passwords. Naturally, I want to do this as
> easily (i.e., over a period of time) as possible.
> 
> I thought the [update encrypted] setting would help me, but obviously I
> have misunderstood its purpose. I have it set to 'yes', and [encrypt
> passwords] is set to 'no'.
> 
> So I thought that once this was done, I would be able to edit my registry
> key and set my PC to send an encrypted password. However, when I did
> this, Samba refused to authenticate me, until I re-edited the registry
> key to send plain-text.
> 
> Can someone kindly clue me in as to how this is supposed to work?
> 
> thanks,
> D.
> 

As long as you have the encrypt passwords set to no the clients will
only authenticate with plain-text passwords. The purpose of the 
update encrypted is to allow you to build your smbpasswd file slowly
and then change the Samba serve to use encrypted passwords once every
user has an entry in smbpasswd. You do not need to modify the client 
machines. When you set the registry key to "allow" plaintext it
sends plaintext to servers that negotiate that (samba with the
encrypt passwords = no) and encrypted passwords to other servers
(including samba with encrypt passwords = yes).

Check your smbpasswd file and see if you have entries for everyone
then just set encrypt passwords = yes and you are now using only
encrypted passwords. For each new user you will have to add them
to the smbpasswd file.

-- 
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Herb Lewis                               Silicon Graphics 
Networking Engineer                      1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy MS-510
Strategic Software Organization          Mountain View, CA  94043-1351
herb at sgi.com                             Tel: 650-933-2177
http://www.sgi.com                       Fax: 650-932-2177          
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