pam_smb has nothing at all to do with winbind. It _IS_ used for NT authentication, but its no where near as good as winbind. pam_smb only supports authing, nothing more. Also, pam_smb requires local accounts as well as NT accounts, so its pretty useless

if anyone wants to talk to me more about this, my msn address is ndi@blueyonder.co.uk

but im off to bed now, so

so the man page says that pam_winbind.so calls the function getpwnam(). i looked at the documentation for getpwnam, and all that seems to do is look into the /etc/passwd file to find users. the man page for winbindd also said "if libnss_winbind was installed correctly, getpwname should always work." when i do a getent passwd, i see all the local users as well as all the users in the domain. this doesnt change the passwd file though. and it seems that getpwnam just looks at the file and nothing else.

could it be that libnss_winbind isn't installed properly? when i add the entries in nsswitch.conf and do an /sbin/ldconfig -v | grep winbind, i get a check echoed back to me.

maybe i should just start all over again and reinstall samba. i would rather not do this if i can avoid it, but i just may have to....

ok, so it is finally working. thank you so much for all the help. the solution was pretty simple.

i had to reboot.

i think that problem was the changes i made to nsswitch.conf were not available to winbind. even when i did the ldconfig. so when i rebooted, it got sent the SIGHUP signal, which reinitialized everything. that was most likely the cause of the problems. either that or winbind was using its old cache and not looking to the PDC. either way, the SIGHUP signal fixed the problem.

now to tackle the home drives.....

again, thanks for all the help. im sure ill be back asking for more help soon.