[Samba] Sure, it's a newbie thing, but I'm willing to be at least ONE person has been bit by this....

[Scott Lovenberg]

Brian Cowan wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I have a Samba system I fire up once in a blue moon for testing, and 
> had a bit of a minor heart attack when it "suddenly" stopped letting 
> me access shares as anyone other than root. Security is set to "user" 
> since it's not a domain member server. My office requires that 
> passwords get changed every 90 days, and the last time I accessed the 
> server was on the other side of one of these "90-day" boundries. I 
> realized this after I increased the Samba logging level and it was 
> telling me it at least recognized my username. So, it must of hated my 
> password. I used smbpasswd -U as root to reset my user password. 
> Suddenly I can get in.
>
> Now, one small question, is there a tool that lets me automatically 
> sync my samba password with the password on the same Unix box? Or am I 
> doomed to have to change it manually every 90 days as well. (It's only 
> one more place to change my password...)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Brian
PAM can sync the passwords.  The setting is 'pam password change = Yes'.

 From man 5 smb.conf:
"With the addition of better PAM support in Samba 2.2, this parameter, 
it is possible to use PAM's password change control flag for Samba. If 
enabled, then PAM will be used for password changes when requested by an 
SMB client instead of the program listed in passwd program. It should be 
possible to enable this without changing your passwd chat parameter for 
most setups."

Another way is to use webmin and it's user and samba modules; there's an 
option to sync users and passwords between the two, but it means that 
you'll have to keep using it for user management.