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Plaintext password for Samba shares....

Background:

Back when 10.4 came out in order to connect to a samba share with plaintext passwords you had to create a nsmb.conf file in the private/etc folder with the following information:

[default]
minauth=none

This allowed from 10.4 and 10.5 mac clients to connect to a samba share with a plaintext password.

Problem:

After upgrading or doing a fresh install of 10.6 and ensuring that the nsmb.conf file was in the private/etc folder we get the error that +"You do not have permission to access the server "server_name"."+ We have 3 main file servers that our users need to be able to mount to and we can no longer do so.

Environment:

Our file servers are running Redhat 5.3, Samba is the version that shipped with that. 10.4/10.5 clients can still connect to the Samba file servers, but 10.6 cannot. At this time our LDAP backend does not support encrypted passwords (sambaSamAccount object class and associated attributes) yet, and is a year or two before we will be able to implement that.

Concerns:

Once new hardware is available I fear that it will be difficult to run 10.5 or older Operating systems on that hardware meaning that we will be forced to use 10.6. I want to be able to use 10.6, but if we can't access file shares via mounting a samba share then we may have to deny getting any "new" apple equipment for our campus.

Solutions:

We have an open case with Apple support and they were very helpful. They identified that they haven't officially supported plaintext passwords from a mac client since 10.4. Though I explained that there was a workaround for this and that something obviously changed in 10.6 from 10.5 that causes the workaround to no longer work for us. They are going to get back to me in a few days to let me know if there is an alternative or that there is nothing they can do.

Does anybody have any alternative solutions or share any similar situations in their environments? I have looked everywhere online and every idea I have seen or tried has not worked. I am at a loss of what else to try. Any suggestions, comments, or thinking outside the box is highly recommended.

Thanks,
Shaun

MacBook Pro 2.4Ghz, Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on Sep 3, 2009 7:47 AM

Reply
16 replies

Sep 15, 2009 6:49 AM in response to joe GU

Apple Support said a lot of people have notified them about this and they are investigating a work around. That may mean they come up with something, but may be something they cannot provide in the short term or potentially ever. They also told me to look into the following solution once it is available for Snow Leopard as a potential workaround:

*Dave - Thursby Software Products*
http://www.thursby.com/products/dave.html

That being said they said they be in touch with me with an update either way. Engineering is looking into it though. I will say this that Apple Support responded very quickly to this and I can't say enough about how awesome OS support was for my first experience. Try calling Microsoft you will be on the phone with someone that can barely speak english and rarely get a solution other than, sorry that is not supported.

Sep 16, 2009 7:05 AM in response to Mike Doz

smbclient does work, great post for those comfortable command line! Unfortunately most our end-users are not familiar with how to use command line :o(.

For those that are not familiar with the client you can connect by the following

smbclient \\\\server_name\\share -U username


This will then prompt you for your password and you will connect in without a problem.

For other details just type:

man smbclient

Sep 25, 2009 9:41 PM in response to scubasteve26

The workaround i am using is as follows:
Open the terminal client.
As a one-time entry, do mkdir /test (or whatever you want to call your mount point)
Then, type the following in terminal:

mount -t smbfs //username@serveraddress/sharefolder test

This will put the share (with its proper name, not "test") on your desktop. If you need to mount more than one share, you'll need to create more mount points and use them in your mount statements.

I was not only having the password problem, but when I go to GO...CONNECT TO SERVER and enter smb://username@serveraddress in Snow Leopard, it no longer works - it just sits there and spins forever. Sometimes it will get to a login window and then tell me my password is wrong (even though it isn't). I'm connecting to corporate Windows Server 2003 shares. If I boot off of my backup clone drive running 10.5, it works fine. Something broke in 10.6, and it's a big problem for everyone I talk to.

Oct 13, 2009 6:50 AM in response to scotepi

scotepi,

I haven't heard a peep from Apple regarding this. They did contact me back stating that engineering is looking at it and we were not the only customer to complain about this. Apple is looking for a workaround for this, but since 10.4 they haven't intentionally supported plain text passwords. The workaround to the nsmb.conf file was a workaround, but some change in 10.6.x has caused connecting with plain text passwords not to work. They were unsure of a timeline, and the case appears to be closed that I had opened. Though they promised to update me once a fix or workaround came available.

Another solution that will probably be available is through Thursby Software, a product called Dave. Ideally you shouldn't have to purchase software to connect to a Samba share, but that is another workaround once they have their new version released that supports Snow Leopard.

Oct 13, 2009 6:52 AM in response to scotepi

scotepi,

I haven't heard a peep from Apple regarding this. They did contact me back stating that engineering is looking at it and we were not the only customer to complain about this. Apple is looking for a workaround for this, but since 10.4 they haven't intentionally supported plain text passwords. The workaround to the nsmb.conf file was a workaround, but some change in 10.6.x has caused connecting with plain text passwords not to work. They were unsure of a timeline, and the case appears to be closed that I had opened. Though they promised to update me once a fix or workaround came available.

Another solution that will probably be available is through Thursby Software, a product called Dave. Ideally you shouldn't have to purchase software to connect to a Samba share, but that is another workaround once they have their new version released that supports Snow Leopard.

http://www.thursby.com/snowleopard/default.html

We were lucky that we are already looking to implement Active Directory and the internal IT server we need to have access to in the field is now on the Domain so we can access it fine from clients that have Snow Leopard. Though for end-users who want to get to the file servers we have, they have to use a web browser at this time, which is not the ideal solution when transferring very large files, so our labs environment is at a stand still at this point in time. We hope that the solution for this is not get these clients running on Active Directory because that is about 6 months to a year out.

-Shaun

Dec 9, 2009 11:06 AM in response to jwrightcs

Sorry for the delay, I never was sent an email about this. Though I was just going to note that Dave has released support for Snow Leopard finally and I am testing that now once they send me an evaluation password and will update on that partial solution. As far as case # I submitted it as follows:

Apple Case # to reference: 135044932 (Opened on 9/3/2009)

I have also re-opened this case to find out if any more information has been available and referenced this forum to them.

Thanks,
Shaun

Plaintext password for Samba shares....

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