i stumbled upon something that gave some nice instructions on how to convert FreeBSD passwords from md5 to blowfish. it was simple and straight forward and it worked.

i'm running samba on the machine.

now i know the tutorial i was following had something where a user's samba and machine account password would sync, so that when he changed his samba password the general user account password would change to match.

first, i want to know if it's a good idea to allow this? right now, i didn't implement that part of the smb.conf file. next, say i were to do this, is there anyway to convert the password system that samba uses to something a bit harder to crack like blowfish? if so, how would to go about doing it?

I wouldn't worry as much with getting the stored Samba passwd in a harder-to-crack format - it's kind of like locking a screen door (assuming the screen door already has a big hole in it). It's much easier to grab the password hash off the network, or grab a copy of an old SAM file from at NT box...