Hello! First off, sorry for my bad english, english is like my 3rd language.

Anyway, I'm currently working on getting a Samba server to work with user security level. The OS I'm using is Debian 4 Etch.

I'm supposed to be able to sync the samba users passwords with /etc/passwd, but how?

In smb.conf I found these lines
But I don't understand how to use it T_T Do I have to put them in a certain script or what?

And I found out I have to have a smb passwd file, so I defined it in the smb.conf with

When I try to change the linux user password by doing
/usr/bin/passwd name
I can change the linux password fine, but it doesn't write into the above defined /etc/samba/passwd.

Can anyone help me? I've been googling the past 2 days and looked around many forums, but so far I didn't find an answer ;;. All I found so far were outdated things from 1998, which don't contain any useful info anyway.

Bump. I still need help ;-;

Passwords for Linux accounts and for Samba accounts are handled separately. Changing a UNIX account password doesn't affect the Samba passwords, and vice versa.

To set UNIX passwords you enter on the command-line:
# passwd <user-name>

To set Samba passwords you enter on the command-line:
# smbpasswd <user-name>

Pass the same password in both cases for the same user-name.

Note: Having a username like 'Joe' as a UNIX account doesn't mean that it's the same 'Joe' as used for Samba. To the system these are simply unrelated similar entries.

But the new Samba only allows usernames that exist in /etc/passwd, and I know that it's possible to sync the passwords (when you change the password in smbpasswd it will be changed in /etc/passwd as well), but the question is, how ;;

EDIT: Well more importantly, how do I make it so the smbpasswd command by default writes into /etc/samba/smbpasswd?

Easily the best way to handle this is to configure Samba to use PAM. ("PAM" = "Pluggable Athentication Modules.")

PAM is a standard system that's used in most Linux installations that I have seen, although it is seldom talked-about except in advanced configurations. Read about it here and here.

The essential idea behind PAM is that "every application needs to do authentication, and wouldn't it be really nice if we could channel all those requests in such a way that all of our apps could use just one system that we could then easily "tweak?" PAM is such a system.

Often, in large installations, centralized directory services such as LDAP (a.k.a. Microsoft "Active Directory") are used to enable the various authentication and authorization requirements to be handled in one place. (PAM, of course, can use LDAP, or Kerberos.) But this admonition, found here, is very telling: