Adding Samba passwords for users

For a number of reasons, Windows password encryption is fundamentally incompatible with Unix password encryption, and although you can enable clear-text passwords (which works around this problem), in the long run it's more effort than allowing Samba to authenticate the Windows password.

So, for each user who:

* has an account on your Samba server
* logs into Windows with a username which matches the Unix account

you must add a Samba password.

For people editing smb.conf manually, run as root: smbpasswd -a.

Webmin and SWAT both have methods for dealing with this, and are easy enough to use that I won't cover them.

If your users log into Windows with a different username, access will be inconvenient from Windows, unless you configure a 'username map' file, which is beyond the current scope of this document.

Now, assuming you enter the same password they use in Windows, you should be able to access the samba server by its netbios name (which defaults to its hostname) or its IP address, as \\server or \\.

The user should be authenticated, and should see a share with their username (ie \\server\user), if not, you may have got a problem somewhere.
source :http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/SysAdmin/Server/Samba

Posted in: mandriva