[Samba] Samba ntlm_auth fails on Fedora core 6

[ken]

Recently installed Fedora core 6  to support, amongst other 
things, Radius-based JANET roaming service. 
(http://www.ja.net/roaming/) To do that we want to authenticate 
against our existing Windows Active Directory, and are hoping to 
use ntlm_auth as described at 
http://www.ja.net/roaming/documents/jrs-compliance-case-study.pdf

Samba (& everything else) installed as default on Fedora, and 
updated to current level with yum:

samba.i386 3.0.23c-2 installed

All of Samba seems to work except ntlm_auth.  PAM, krb5, and 
niss are configured, winbindd is running. We can join the 
domain, list resources, use smbclient, & so on.

When we try ntlm_auth we see this:

# ntlm_auth
ntlm_auth: error opening config file /etc/samba/smb.conf. Error 
was Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character

But /etc/samba/smb.conf is perfectly fine as far as we can tell.

Also we see the same error when using a 0-byte empty 
/etc/samba/smb.conf

Any clues?

Ken Brown
CCS Systems Team
Birkbeck College