W2K not sending pw for Samba

[Lazarus18]

I just installed W2K on my formerly 98 box. I had Dave installed which seemed to preclude the use of Samba, but since doing a clean install of 10.1 I wanted to get Samba up and running again. I've set up shares and all that without issue. The problem is connecting to them. I've got the password encryption option set to on, which I thought would resolve any communication problems, but it seems that either W2K isn't sending the username/pw or samba doesn't realize it's a valid name. What happens is:

I connect to the server using w2k. My username and password is the same on both the OSX and W2K boxes. I see the shares. I click on one, it says something about invalid username or name not recognized or some such nonsense. If I set the shares to allow guest access then of course everything is grand. But that's not what I want to do.

How do I make sure that samba is looking at the list of users in netinfo? If that's OK, how do I make sure that W2K is sending it properly?

Thanks,
-Rob

[rharder]

I'm having a similar problem (the IPC$ problem) with my Win98 box.

I found some Common Samba Errors pages, and they discussed this. 'Seems that after you configure Samba to use encrypted passwords (I use SWAT) you have to manually add "users" to the samba user database, of sorts, with the smbpasswd -a user command.

Problem: the smbpasswd command on my system doesn't support the -a flag, so I don't know what's up.

-Rob

[Lazarus18]

Well, that's my problem too. You can add users through SWAP. But I have a new set of problems....

Actually I think it's the explanation for the one problem, not new. I can't change my passwd with smbpasswd. When I try it says something to the effect of password not recognized. I think that's why samba won't accept the connections from W2K. When I try to add a user through SWAP it just kind of sits there, but never returns a new page. Any thoughts? Not sure how to get samba playing nice here.

-Rob

[Lazarus18]

I fianlly got this to work, so I thought I'd post the answer for anyone else's benefit.

Once you turn on encrypted passwords samba will look to its password file to verify the user. Problem is that the default install has no password file. This explains my problem. So you must add the file. Doing this requires logging in as root. I think this explains rharder's problem. so it's:
% su
Password:
# cd /usr/local/samba/bin
# smbpasswd -a usernameyouwanttocreate

You get a bunch of error messages, but ignore them. It does create the user and ask you for the passwords you want assigned to it. It looks like this:
[localhost:local/samba/bin] root# smbpasswd -a test
New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
startsmbfilepwent_internal: unable to open file /usr/local/samba/private/smbpasswd. Error was No such file or directory
unable to open passdb database.
startsmbfilepwent_internal: unable to open file /usr/local/samba/private/smbpasswd. Error was No such file or directory
Added user test.

The passwd file will now be in /usr/local/samba/private for future reference. Theoretically you can do nifty tricks to update this file with the system passwd file automatically, but as I'm the sole user of my machine changing passwords doesn't really happen, so I didn't look into it. Hope this helped someone.

[legacyb4]

Rob,

Thanks for the tips; definitely easier than the SSCT page instructions.

However, I still have the following problem(s) with my OS X machine in a proper NT domain environment:

Samba 2.2.2 is configured to a T (I think) using SSCT

GLOBAL:
Servername: OS X server name according to NT requirements
Workgroup: NT domain name
WINS: NT domain WINS server IP address

SECURITY:
Security Type: NT Domain
Guest acount: Guest
Map unknown users to guest: ON
Encrypt passwords: ON
Allow Hosts: IP address of machine I'm connecting from

SHARES:
Name: Share name in Brackets
Path: mapped to desired folder on OS X server
Permissions: Writeable

I can browse the server under My Network Places (on a Windows 2000 box) but when I click on the actual shared folder, I get the following message:

\\server_name\share_name is not accessible
The credentials supplied conflict with an existing set of credentials

The killer thing is that I cannot create accounts under smbpasswd unless those exist in the system password file (message I get is: User USER does not exist in system password file (usually /etc/passwd). Cannot add account without a valid local system user.)

What am I missing now?

Cheers.