Request SMBPASWD feature

Max TenEyck Woodbury mtew at cds.duke.edu
Fri Dec 21 10:35:03 GMT 2001


One of the sticking points when using SaMBa is that two sets of
passwords need to be maintained, one for SMB and the other for
the host OS, usually a UNIX variant. A partial solution exists
on some systems in the form of SMB-PAM modules. They let the
UNIX like system validate passwords against the SMB password
database. The problem is that, allegedly, you have to be on a
WinXX box to change your password. I use the term 'allegedly'
because SMBPASSWD can be used to change your SMB password from
a UNIX box. You can even change the SMB password remotely by
using the -r <host> option where <host> is the name of the
machine containing the SMBPASSWD data file.

What is missing is the ability to automatically lookup the name
of the machine containing the SMBPASSWD data file. Once that
information is available, it should be used as the default
<host> for SMBPASSWD rather than the local machine as it is
now. Once that is done, it would be possible to alias SMBPASSWD
to PASSWD in much the same way YPPASSWD is often aliased to 
PASSWD when NIS passwords are used.

I'm fairly sure that this could be done. How much work would
this be? How likely is it that this change would be made?
How soon might this get done if it should be done?

MTEW




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