[Samba] smbpasswd -r connecting to old samba not working

[Wayne Schroeder]

The only problem with that is the old servers are NOT our servers --
they are not managed by us.  It's hard for us to tell people 'hey, we
updated something, so now you have to'.  Regardless of if it is a bug
with the old version of samba, I would imagine there is some value in
being backwards compatible with old versions, regardless of being
maintained.  The crux of the whole deal is that in the world of password
changing, the old smbpassword worked against everything, now in order to
get support for the new 2003 server boxes that need samba 3 to connect
to them, we lose support for changing passwords on a large set of other
boxes.  The obvious answer to this from an operational stand point is to
use the old binary / install base for changing passwords on these boxes,
but I was hoping that there was some simple fix / work around that would
address the backwards compatibility issue I have ran into.  It seems
somewhat strange that we would strive for backwards compatibility for
old servers using protocols like CORE, COREPLUS, LANMAN1, LANMAN2 etc..
but not support older samba releases IMHO.

Wayne


Gerald (Jerry) Carter wrote:
> Wayne Schroeder wrote:
> 
>>>The error message is on the SERVER though... regardless of the server's
>>>error bugs or not, the new smbpasswd won't work, yet the old one does...
>>>so something in smbpasswd or it's supporting libs on the new version 3
>>>source tree is doing something different I would imagine.
>>>
>>>
>>>>On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 05:39:01PM -0500, Wayne Schroeder wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>I am trying to build 3.0.14a and use it's smbpasswd binary to change
>>>>>passwords on a remote debian woody samba install -- the samba install on
>>>>>the remote debian machine is listed as '2.2.3a-15'  I can use the
>>>>>previous smbpasswd binary from the same version on the client linux
>>>>>machine to smbpasswd -r and change user passwords, but the new version
>>>>
>>>>>from 3.0.14a does not work against the 2.2.3a version.  I get an error
>>>>
>>>>>message like:
>>>>>
>>>>>[2005/06/14 16:45:17, 0] smbd/chgpasswd.c:check_oem_password(817)
>>>>>check_oem_password: incorrect password length (-177685840).
> 
> 
> I would be more inclined to call this a bug in 2.2.3a (on debian
> right) ?  Since 2.2 is no longer being maintained, you could try to
> track this down own your own or possibly upgrade.
> 
> Another method would be to start trying smbpasswd from 3.0.x
> releases 3.0.14a and movning backwards to see when the
> incompatibility was introduced. We could then look at the svn
> logs to try to isolate the change and come up with a workaround.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> cheers, jerry
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