[Samba] password alignment with /etc/passwd

[Markus Franke]

Gary Dale wrote:
> 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.

Hmmm....I can't believe this. Let's consider the case that you have a
network with NFS/NIS Installation and Linux only clients and about 100
users. Now I want to add just one...only one windows box...and it should
be possible that the existing users can login on this box via their
usual password and they should get their Linux home directory directly
mounted via Samba. In this case I would have to change the passwords of
100 users just to enable the usage of 1 windows pc? Is there really no
other solution except of john the ripper? (which would probably not be
able to resolve all the passwords)

Thanks for reply,

Markus Franke