[Samba] Samba and /etc/passwd

[John Mazza]

This sounds like a situation just crying out for Winbind authentication.
I'd say set the boxes up for that rather than messing around with
the /etc/passwd files.

With Winbind, you don't need "local" accounts.



On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 08:17 +0900, Michael Heydon wrote:
> 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>
>