[Samba] smbd daemon running as wrong user ID

[Guido Gonzato]

Hello,

I have a strange problem affecting samba-3.0.10-1.4E.12.2 on a Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux AS release 4 system.

We have a multi-domain configuration here at University of Verona 
(Italy). We use Samba as PDC for several faculties. Each faculty has its 
own daemon instance and its own smb config file:

[root at ldapvr1 ~]# ls /etc/samba/smb.*
/etc/samba/smb.conf             /etc/samba/smb.giurisprudenza.conf 
/etc/samba/smb.medicina.conf
/etc/samba/smb.economia.conf    /etc/samba/smb.labfac.conf 
/etc/samba/smb.motorie.conf
/etc/samba/smb.erasmus.conf     /etc/samba/smb.lettere.conf 
/etc/samba/smb.scienze.conf
/etc/samba/smb.formazione.conf  /etc/samba/smb.lingue.conf 
/etc/samba/smb.template.conf
[root at ldapvr1 ~]#

the problem is that sometimes we have one of the daemons running as the 
'nobody' user ID or, worse, as normal user. Extract of a 'ps uax' command:

root      6018  0.0  0.1 11416 2816 ?        S    12:44   0:00 
/usr/sbin/smbd_motorie -D -s /etc/samba/smb.motorie.conf -l 
/var/log/samba/motorie
vr002419  6090  0.0  0.1 11820 2960 ?        S    12:47   0:00 
/usr/sbin/smbd_economia -D -s /etc/samba/smb.economia.conf -l 
/var/log/samba/economia
root      6091  0.0  0.1 11556 2940 ?        S    12:47   0:00 
/usr/sbin/smbd_economia -D -s /etc/samba/smb.economia.conf -l 
/var/log/samba/economia
nobody    6093  0.0  0.1 11412 2152 ?        S    12:47   0:00 
/usr/sbin/smbd_economia -D -s /etc/samba/smb.economia.conf -l 
/var/log/samba/economia
root      6106  0.0  0.0  5628  632 pts/2    R+   12:47   0:00 grep smb

as you can see, process 6090 runs as user ID vr002419, while process 
6093 runs as 'nobody'. User IDs are provided by an external LDAP server.

I'm just a deputy sysadmin for this server (the Big Guy's on holiday), 
and I must admit I don't have much experience with Samba. I searched the 
docs but I didn't find any reference to this behaviour.

Any hints on how to fix this situation?
Thanks a lot,
      Guido

-- 
Guido Gonzato, Ph.D. <guido dot gonzato at univr dot it> - Sysadmin
Universita' di Verona (Italy), Servizi Informatici di Ateneo
Via S. Francesco 22, 37129 Verona (Italy)
   "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."
     -- Derek Bok