[shares-admin] Sharing a folder does not create SMB account

[Onno Benschop]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-tools

Setting up a shared folder, using SMB, does not actually create the Samba user, requiring the user to run the following command before access is possible:

  sudo smbpasswd -a `whoami`

The symptom on a WinNT host is that it continues to prompt for a password.

I strongly suspect that a desktop user would expect that the SMB account is the same as their login account, even though the two are separate, suggesting that the username and password should be synchronised.

It is possible that this bug report needs to be assigned to samba, but I hesitate to do that because it is the GUI that is hiding (and missing) the functionality.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been
reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report
any further bugs which you find.

[Onno Benschop (onno-itmaze)]

Sorry about that, spent a good hour hunting...

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

no problem, it's not easy to spot duplicates. An hint for gnome-system-tools, from the bug page https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system-tools/+bugs, you can click on the "shares-admin" tag on the left pane, there only 6 bugs listed there which is faster to review for duplicate

[Onno Benschop (onno-itmaze)]

Sigh, thanks, missed that.

[Lealcy B. Junior (lealcy)]

Windows users cannot access my shared folders. Always they try appears a logon window, but it don't accept nothing.

The "smbpasswd -a" returns the output below:

root@cpd04:~# smbpasswd -a anyuser
New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
Failed to modify password entry for user anyuser

And the "guest ok = yes" flag in the smb.conf does not take effect.

There's anywhere a comprehensive tutorial to share some folder with a windows user under SMB? Otherwise it's a dead feature.

[andrewguy9 (adthomson)]

This is a common use case, and the expectation of a user would be that samba's user name and password would match the system's login information ( Since thats how those Microsoft guys do it. ) The samba package really should sync with the user accounts. To share a folder and then not have access because there are no smb users is neither intuitive or acceptable.

[Alexandre Otto Strube (surak)]

andrewguy9, there are problems with this approach. Especially the fact that an user password is sent unencrypted through the network. Take a look at how mac os handles that.