[Samba] Samba and /etc/passwd

[Michael Heydon]

Shain Miley wrote:
> Hello all,
> I was wondering if anyone knew a way to configure samba so that it 
> does not use /etc/passwd for a list of users,group id's,etc.  I am 
> currently setting up a server to authenticate against AD.  I have that 
> configured fine.  The overall goal here is to provide a samba backup 
> to our existing fileserverserver.  Here is the problem:  we need a way 
> to sync the info in /etc/passwd between servers, these two serves will 
> have a different list of users,groups,etc.  So instead of writing a 
> script that will compare the two and add the ones as needed (as well 
> as do a bunch of other cleanup work) I thought maybe I could have 
> samba point to /home/user_name/passwd instead...samba has what it 
> needs..and the accounts on the server itself (/etc/passwd) can be left 
> untouched.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Shain

Samba doesn't look at /etc/password directly, however it does require 
that any user who connects must have a valid uid on the server. I can 
suggest a couple of ways you could hack something together to make it 
easy to sync parts of /etc/password between machines but I would suggest 
checking out ldap first.

*Michael Heydon - IT Administrator *
michaelh at jaswin.com.au <mailto:michaelh at jaswin.com.au>