[Samba] Re: windows xp connect to share - cannot change user name from guest

[matthew arnison]

Well I'm a bit embarassed. The problem turned out to an old version of
samba running on the server. It's running samba 1.9.18p8.

I'm not a system admin on the main server here. But I tried connecting to
another box running samba 2.2.3a, and found I could type into the
username box just using a normal network neighbourhood connection. The
username field was *not* greyed out, like it was when connecting the same
way to the older version of samba.

I switched back and forth several times and found it was repeatable. It's
also independent of whether the passwords are encrypted or not on the
samba 2.2.3a server.

Sorry for bothering the list earlier with an out of date version of samba.
Perhaps though this might help others diagnosing this problem in future.

Cheers,
Matthew.


On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, matthew arnison wrote:

> Hi
>
> We've been using samba at my work for ages. Now we have a couple of WInXP
> machines. We do not have a domain or anything, the samba server is just
> set to user level access control. We log in to windows using the same
> username as our account on the samba server. Samba and the windows clients
> are set to use unencrypted (plain text) passwords.
>
> The problem is that when we connect to the samba share through the network
> neighborhood, WinXP gives a login box which has the user name "guest", and
> it is greyed out so that you cannot change it. This is despite the fact
> that I am logged into WinXP as "username".
>
> It's only about 10 years since Mac OS figured out that you need to allow
> the user to set their username and password when logging into network
> drives. Why does it take Microsoft so long to get this right? Win9x/ME
> won't let you change the username, but it does atleast use the Windows
> login name. WinNT and maybe Win2K do let you change the username. But now
> WinXP has regressed to behaviour that is sillier than all of them. Not
> only is the username box disabled, the default user name is *different* to
> the username you login to WinXP with.
>
> Now there are workarounds. But they seem pretty dodgy to me.
>
> 1. Usually (not always) we find we can use "Map network drive..." to set
> the username and password, and that logs in OK. After this has been done
> *once* per user, the username seems to stick even after logging out of
> windows, rebooting etc., and then the network neighborhood login works.
> Although the "connect to" login box still displays guest and is greyed
> out, it seems to actually send the username from the Map network drive
> box.
>
> 2. For one user, this didn't work. So we went into the User management
> control panel, clicked on her username, then selected "manage network
> passwords." You can then Add a password, and if you get the recipe exactly
> right, it remembers it and works. (Note that this forces you to save the
> password on the Windows machine, this feature is designed to avoid having
> to type the password in each time you connect to the network. Tough if you
> *want* to type it in each time rather than trust Windows to store it
> securely.)
>
> E.g.
>
> Server: \\HOSTNAME\SHARENAME
>
> User name: HOSTNAME\username
>
> Password: xxxxxxxx
>
> You have to get this format exactly right. You can't simply put in the
> username, you have to have the HOSTNAME\ bit in front or WinXP complains.
> I also tried username at hostname.uni.edu.au, and that didn't work either.
>
> 3. I guess you could setup domain security, presumably it lets you avoid
> this mess entirely. But that's a fair bit of extra work.
>
> Anyway, I'm writing to see if there's some way that people know to make it
> easier. And also to atleast document this craziness. After quite a bit of
> searching I couldn't find anything about this on the net, in the samba
> pages, or in the archives for this list.
>
> Cheers,
> Matthew.
>
>