[Samba] password alignment with /etc/passwd

[Gary Dale]

Rashkae wrote:
> stephen mulcahy wrote:
>> Hi Markus,
>>
>>
>> Markus Franke wrote:
>>> well it's actually very close to what I want. The problem is that the
>>> existing user passwords should be preserved. I don't want to create new
>>> passwords for each user. Is it somehow possible to convert the encoded
>>> password string in /etc/passwd to /etc/samba/smbpasswd?
>>
>> As far as I know this isn't possible ... but I'm not a samba expert. I'd
>> be delighted to find out otherwise.
>
> The encoded passwords can't be moved over directly, to the best of my 
> knowledge.  I've never tried this before, but if I needed to so 
> something like this, I would try attacking my my /etc/passwd with John 
> the Ripper to get plaintext of most of the passowrds, then feed those 
> into smbpasswd (by script if theres enough to warrant it.)
The passwords in /etc/passwd should be unrecoverable in theory (apart 
from a brute-force attack) if you are using a reasonable encrypting 
scheme (every distro I know defaults to a decent one) and 
strength-checking (not usually used) . And the encryption scheme is 
different from what Windows uses, so there is no reasonable way of 
converting them.

You could try the suggested dictionary attack which will get the weak 
passwords.