Is it possible to tell smbmount (or smbclient and all other Samba programs that require a password) to use the encrypted password stored in the smbpasswd file? This would be a very useful feature, and it is more secure than using a credentials file with plain-text passwords. It also simplifies system administration. Since the passwords are already stored in encrypted form, and since Samba knows how to communicate with WinNT/2K/XP machines using encrypted passwords, it seems like such an obvious feature to be able to take the encrypted password from smbpasswd and send it to the remote WinNT/2K/XP machine. This is very usefil in situations where Windows user names and passwords are the same as Samba (and UNIX) user names and passwords. You should be able to set an option to smbmount as follows: smbmount //host/share /path -o username=myself,smbpasswd The above would tell smbmount to connect as user "myself" and to look up the password from the smbpasswd file defined in "smb.conf". Something along these lines woudl be very useful.
This feature is not supported and could actually be a security risk. Thanks for the feedback but I think we'll have to pass on this for now.
I understand you concern about security, but just out of curiosity, how woudl my suggestion be any worse than storing plain-text passwords in a credentials file? It seems to me that using encrypted smbpasswd passwords is more secure. Then again, I might be wrong.
database cleanup