Until changes made in 3.0.6, one could change the password of a computer account using "smbpasswd -m host password". Now that support for giving the password in the command line was removed for some reason or other, this of course is no longer possible. Unfortunataly, using stdin for passwords does not work with computer accounts. E.g. # smbpasswd -s -m hostname fails with Failed to set password for user hostname$. Failed to modify password entry for user hostname$ without even asking for a password. It does work for users, but when doing # smbpasswd hostname$ secret[RETURN] secret[RETURN] instead, the workstation flag is changed to a user flag, requiring a # smbpasswd -e -m hostname to fix. So, apart from asking you to try and not change command line syntax from one minor version to another, it would be good if you treated a computer account the same as a user account in this regard, as there are quite valid reasons why one would need to set computer passwords to arbitrary values.
(echo password; echo password) | smbpasswd -s -m machine
(In reply to comment #1) > (echo password; echo password) | smbpasswd -s -m machine Are you sure you actually tried in v3.0.7? I did, and all I get is: # useradd machine$; smbpasswd -a -m machine Added user machine$. # (echo secret; echo secret) | smbpasswd -s -m machine Failed to set password for user machine$. Failed to modify password entry for user machine$ stdin does work for users, not for machine accounts. If I've missed something, please let me know. Thanks.
Jeremy, since you are the one who removed this beahvior, i'm going to let you deal with this. I've already handled several reports relating to it on the mailing list.
Just a quick question: What are you using this for? Machine passwords are set upon account creation. They are usually not set manually. A machine changes it itself. Volker
(In reply to comment #4) > Just a quick question: What are you using this for? I know the mechanism behind machine accounts. We need this for cloning Windows installations (there's one image, computers are cloned during PXE on every start (self healing), machine accounts are set to random values on server and client, and then the actual OS starts; compared to other imaging systems like Ghost, there's no reboot or manually re-joining a domain necessary).
maybe later.