Samba can be one of those things that causes a ton of headaches. It always feels like a huge slowdown when I get to the Samba portion of my media server install. This time I decided to check out using Webmin for my samba configuration and I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it made some of the configurations.
I will hit on the major things to be noted here, firstly the idea of separate samba and system users. You can set up synchronization between these so that when a user is created it gets added to the smbpasswd file also. I created my system users earlier and converted them to samba users, so the synchronization didn’t do me any good for my original user set. New users will be created in the smbpasswd file correctly. In any case, the current users I had did not have the password hash information in the smbpasswd file. An example looks like this: (more…)