UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I'm new to this site, so my apologies if this is posted to the wrong board.

I'm the student administrator of a small computer science lab (20 Win 7 PCs) at a university. The logins to the PCs are handled by samba (v. 3.5.8) on a CentOS server (kernel v. 2.6.9-100.ELsmp). Recently I noticed a problem where I could successfully create domain users on the server, but they would not be able to log in. Looking into this further, I discovered I was also unable to change domain passwords for users: the password changing script I've been told to use does not return any errors, but I'm still only able to log in with the old password (new password is "incorrrect").

Domain account creation & resetting is done with passwd and smbpasswd. I can post the full scripts if needed, but I don't think that's the issue.

A couple weeks ago, I transferred the /home directory over to a new hard drive. One of my friends mentioned the problem could be related to corrupted data (which I doubt) or incorrect permissions transferring. Here is exactly what I did:

Code:

 mkdir /newhome
 mount /dev/sde1 /newhome #sde1 is the new hard drive
 cd /home #old hard drive (sdb1)
 tar cf - * | (cd /newhome; tar xvf -)
 umount /newhome
 umount /home
 mount /dev/sde1 /home
 # then I updated /etc/fstab to point to the new /home (sde1)

My usual course of action in situations like these is to make sure all the software on the server is up to date, then proceed from there. However, the faculty lab administrator expressly prohibited me from doing this (sigh...), so I'm stuck with the current version of samba and an ancient kernel.

I looked through the samba log as well when I tried to log in with a newly-created domain account (testuser). Here is the output from less <samba log>.log | grep testuser. Server name and workstation names have been replaced by <mydomain> and <client pc> because I don't want to get in trouble:

Code:

  SAM Logon (Interactive). Domain:[<mydomain>].  User:[testuser@<client pc>] Requested Domain:[<mydomain>]
  Attempting validation level 3 for unmapped username testuser.
  Mapping user [<mydomain>]\[testuser] from workstation [<client pc>]
  attempting to make a user_info for testuser (testuser)
  making strings for testuser's user_info struct
  making blobs for testuser's user_info struct
  check_ntlm_password:  Checking password for unmapped user  [<mydomain>]\[testuser]@[<client pc>] with the new password  interface
  check_ntlm_password:  mapped user is: [<mydomain>]\[testuser]@[<client pc>]
   Key: USER_testuser
  check_sam_security: Couldn't find user 'testuser' in passdb.
  check_ntlm_password: sam authentication for user [testuser] FAILED with error NT_STATUS_NO_SUCH_USER
  check_ntlm_password:  Authentication for user [testuser] -> [testuser] FAILED with error NT_STATUS_NO_SUCH_USER

I humbly admit I don't have extensive experience in *nix networking, so any advice would be appreciated.

And you are in a Windows Domain no? And who administers the Domain?
Has there been some AD / Windows server update lately? IMHO It seems like smb issues with the recent windows server (>win2003-R2) where the AD changed NTLM to ??? using kerberos, you are lucky because using an OS (linux) that seem to be able to cope easily which is not the case of solaris or worse AIX... (really not obvious...)
Do some googling ! you will see plenty of pages