[Bug 1700588] Re: samba package should prompt the user to create a Samba password when first installed (or re-use their existing one)

[Andreas Hasenack]

Thank you for filing this bug in Ubuntu.

Samba needs its own user/password database because essentially the
encryption mechanisms used during windows authentication are different
from what Linux uses.

How and where to store these databases is configurable and there is no
one-size-fits-all solution. Some installations are happy with Samba's
tdb local on disk database file. Others prefer to have users in LDAP.
Even when using a single backend like LDAP, however, there are still
separate attributes for windows and linux passwords. Or the
authentication might be delegated to Kerberos.

To create a samba user, it's usually not always just a matter of running
"smbpasswd -a". It depends on the backend and on each site's policies.
Furthermore, how would the samba package decide which users should be
added to the Samba database? What's "active user"? There are way too
many variables, and it's not Ubuntu's place to decide that. Samba is an
application on top of Ubuntu, and how it's used is up to the
administrator.


** Changed in: samba (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Opinion

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1700588

Title:
  samba package should prompt the user to create a Samba password when
  first installed (or re-use their existing one)

Status in samba package in Ubuntu:
  Opinion

Bug description:
  Kubuntu 17.04
  Samba 2:4.5.8+dfsg-0ubuntu0.17.04.2

  Ubuntu's samba package doesn't set a samba password for the active
  user once installed.

  This leaves the user with a non-functional samba installation unless
  the user manually runs `smpasswd -a <user>` (bad user experience) or
  their GUI file manager notices this condition and does it for them
  (fragmentation and inconsistency among clients).

  
  The package's installation should somehow trigger a prompt to create a Samba password--or better yet, have Samba re-use the user's existing login password, if that's possible.

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