[ILUG] Samba problem upgrading to Red Hat 7.3

[Gary Coady]

On Wed, Jul 03, 2002 at 02:16:26AM +0100, Ciaran Costelloe wrote:
> On versions of Red Hat up to 7.2, I have set up a directory accessible to
> all our internal Windows network users by setting in smb.conf
> security=share, guest account=everybody, and setting a share as:
> 
> [mypublicdir]
> guest ok=yes
> writable=yes
> path=/

I take it that you want this user to be able to write to the whole
directory tree then? You'll want to be root to do this, not 'everybody'.
So
force user root
in the share might help you there...

Leave the default guest account as it was - the identity of the default
guest account is not used for authentication, just for who Samba uses
for access to services.

But if you really want to set a null password for user 'everybody',
create the user with a password, then edit /etc/shadow (carefully, you
might want a backup :) to take out the value between the first and
second colon, for the line starting with 'everybody'.

I don't know if RH 7.3 uses 'passwd' to set the password when creating a
user - if it does, the problem is probably in /etc/pam.d - the file
'passwd' might contain the required settings for valid passwords. It'll
probably point to a 'system-auth' file - which on the machine I have access,
has the line
password sufficient /lib/security/pam_unix.so nullok use_authtok md5 shadow
If that's the way your machine is set up, you might be missing the
'nullok' part, which would change the behaviour back to what you're used
to. Note: I have no access to a 7.3 machine, so not sure about this :)

You REALLY don't want to do this though. Firstly you probably won't
be FHS compliant (grin). Secondly, do you REALLY want to share out ALL
the files on the disk - remote system administration? There are much
better solutions (webmin, ssh). And if you edit any files as an admin,
you're probably going to run into Windows/UNIX line ending issues
somewhere...
If you want to create a share for people to use, put it somewhere nice
like /var/lib/samba/shares/ - or at least create a folder /public and
share that out instead. More secure and, seemingly, little downside?

Gary.