Managing Samba services

To access the resources of Samba, a user needs a POSIX (Linux) user account available to them and a Samba account. The POSIX account can be an ordinary account within the /etc/passwd file or this account can be centralized in LDAP or an Active Directory. When a POSIX account is enabled for Samba, additional attributes that are required by Windows systems are added to the user account. To enable an existing POSIX account with Samba, we can use the /bin/pdbedit command. This can work with Samba accounts in the following account stores:

• The /etc/samba/smbpasswd file

• The tdbsam database located at /var/lib/samba/private/passdb.tdb (this is the default samba account store)

• The OpenLDAP directory services

As existing domain accounts have the required attributes for Samba, there is no requirement to enable those accounts for Samba.

Firstly, we will list all existing Samba enabled accounts. Of course, we have only installed Samba and not enabled any other account. Also, we only...