[Samba] "net rpc vampire" case sensitivity problem

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2004-03-24 at 22:34, Ed Ravin wrote:
> We just migrated a small network from a Win2K PDC to Samba, using
> "net rpc vampire" into a tdbsam backend on a Samba 3.0.2a Linux box.
> 
> One of the users, let's call him Jon Harker, had the NT username "JHarker".
> When we ran  "pdbedit -v jharker", we saw this:
> 
>    Unix username:        JHarker
>    NT username:          JHarker
> 
> Well, that looks wrong - the NT username can be mixed case for all I care,
> but shouldn't the Unix name be all lower case?
> 
> We changed jharker's /etc/passwd entry to "JHarker" and he was subsequently
> able to login.  Since we didn't like that as a fix, we changed /etc/passwd
> back to all lower case and carefully edited the passdb.tdb in emacs (the
> binary editor of choice on Unix systems :-) to knock the mixed-case usernames
> into lower case, which also fixed the problem.
> 
> Both of these users already had accounts (all lower case) in /etc/passwd
> before we ran "net rpc vampire".
> 
> Other than this, the vampire process ran very smoothly.
----
This is a natural occurrence when you use mixed cases in Windows systems
for user names. Windows is pretty much indifferent to the user name case
but will store it as however it was typed originally when added to the
sam. With a Windows logon controller, you could type jharker, JHARKER,
JHarker or jhARKER and as long as you had the password correct, it would
still successfully log in (yes the password is indeed case sensitive).

As you know, Unix/Linux is very much case sensitive on all things such
as files as well as users. On Linux/Unix, both JHarker and jharker could
exist as separate users where on Windows, this wouldn't be allowed. It
is the same with stored files... Test Document.doc is the same name as
test document.doc on a Windows file server. but both files could exist
happily in the same Unix directory without conflict. 

As for already having the user in /etc/passwd 'prior' to net rpc
vampire...that's the reason that you didn't get an error when you did
the vampire.

Viva le difference...

Craig