[Samba] Authenticating against local PAM configuration

[Madhusudan Singh]

Hello

I have a (OpenSuSE 11.2) linux server that uses our organization LDAP to
authenticate users.

ssh logins work fine.

I have installed a samba server on this server machine and wish to use the
same authentication mechanism for Samba clients.

I do not have any access to the LDAP server (it runs on windows, I think)
and it is against our organization's IT policy to allow saving the LDAP
admin password on client machines.

I have plenty of Howtos about integrating samba with Open LDAP, but they all
require saving the admin password in smbpasswd. Not an option at all here.

Our IT people installed some kind of a binary module on the linux machine to
allow it to authenticate ssh users but that is the extent to which they are
willing to go.

Can I somehow ask samba to forward all authentications to the server pam
configuration (without explicitly specifying the passdb backend) ? That
method will most likely work for us because the pam authentication mechanism
works perfectly.

Thanks.