Problem:

accounts created by smbpasswd -a does not work with samba-3.5.10-125.el6.x86_64 though it was working fine on a previous version I was using, samba-3.0.33-3.38.el5_8. Both ship with centos 5.8 and centos 6.3 respectively.

increasing log level = 3 shows the following error on samba 3.5.10 which where not on 3.0.33

*ntlm_password_check: Lanman passwords NOT PERMITTED for user myuser

On the client side, Netbootdisk on my instance, it is saying that my password is invalid. But on Windows desktop I was able to log in just fine.

comparing the output of testparm -v on both version shows that samba 3.5.8 change some default settings from lower version if it were not specified on your smb.conf. Particularly the lanman auth was set to No by default which cause the above Lanman passwords NOT PERMITTED … error.

lower version: lanman auth = Yes

newer version: lanman auth = No

After entering lanman auth = Yes into smb.conf

The error changed to

*ntlm_password_check: NO LanMan password set for user myuser (and no NT password supplied)

after fiddling around with the other default settings I was still stuck with that error.Then I decided to issue again the command

smbpasswd -a myuser

and this solve my problem I was now able to login into samba 3.5.10 from Netbootdisk like before.

It seems that smbpasswd will not create a LanMan password if the lanman auth setting was left on its own and you have to reissue that smbpasswd command in case you decided to change lanman auth to Yes it later on.

Not sure if it were in the release notes I did not bother to read them maybe I should have.