[Samba] Problem with disabled user name and password fields in login dialogue on Windows XP SP2

[Jonas Olsson]

Hello,

We are having some problems with logging on to several Windows XP Pro SP2
clients at several different sites running Samba 3.0.10 as domain server.

The situation is that the "User name" and "Password" fields in the "Log On
to Windows" window are greyed out on the Windows XP clients. The third
field, "Log on to", where you can choose between the domain and the local
computer is not greyed out. However, it does not matter if you choose to
log on to the domain or to the local computer. The password and user name
fields remain disabled.

We have not found any reliable way of inducing the behaviour. During the
last incident with three different computers having the same problem
during the same day we noticed the following message in their respective
event logs:

"The time service has not been able to synchronize the system time for
49152 seconds because none of the time providers has been able to provide
a usable time stamp. The system clock is unsynchronized."

On the systems in question the NTP service was configured to use time from
an NTP server that was unavailable. Their internal clocks were a few
minutes (2-3) off compared to the Samba server's clock.

The situation is not permanent however. A reboot of the workstation
"solves" the problem. We also use a software deployment environment where
you assign jobs to a computer on a central server and a local agent on
each workstation polls for jobs from the server. When the agent receives a
job it runs it by logging on to the workstation as a local user and runs
the scripts provided. This also removes the error condition.

Has anyone come across this problem earlier?

  /Jonas Olsson