[Samba] Stupid problem with SAMBA and Windows NT4...

[Rainer Hantsch]

Hello!

Because I have the strangest problems at one of my customers, I want to ask a
few questions on what I could do to make his life easier...

Server: Samba 2.5.x on SuSE 8.1 (that samba which comes with SuSE 8.1)
        Password-Encryption=NO   PDC-Controller: NONE
        This is a simple workgroup LAN.
        There is also one Windows NT4.0 Server there, running since some
        years.

Clients:Windows NT 4.0 Workstation
        PlainTextPassword-Patch installed.  Windows-Users log in with no
        password into the Windows-Network.
        Because the Linux-Server is primarily the Internet Mailserver,
        this machine uses good passwords. (Does not harm users, because
        Eudora remembers the password, so they do not have to hack it in.)

So this is a very trivial LAN environment, but surely good enough for 5 Users
and running since years. Because the Windows-Server is now running out of
disk space, I tried to activate SAMBA now (to move some files to Linux).

I did this several times many times before, and I am very sure that I
configured everything correctly, because it basically works.


My questions:
-------------
a.)  Is there a way to have Windoze login as soothly as Win98 does?
     I would like that Windows does remember the last password, but it
     seems to be too dumb for that.

b.)  Primarily I need only printing from SAMBA, but I must connect a
     network drive, otherwise printing is also dead.

c.)  While other customers (also running NT4 + SAMBA) have no problems
     with printing, this Windoze always writes "Cannot connect to printer"
     in the header of the printer status window, BUT IT STILL PRINTS.
     But I am unable to see queued jobs and/or delete some, which defini-
     tely works at another customer. (-> But I compared the setup, it is
     identical! Something special/new with Samba 2.2.5? the other customer
     is running an older samba (SuSE 8.0)).   :-/

d.)  Is there a way to let SAMBA accept connections without any password,
     while the user accounts on the Linux-Server are still with good pass-
     words? -- I will prefer SAMBA access without any password. Because
     everything is bound to the local NIC and the server is running fire-
     wall, Masquerading,..., this shouldn't be really dangerous at all.
     Maybe this will help.


mfg

  Ing. Rainer Hantsch