Authentication

Before looking at the configuration file, it is important to understand how samba authenticates access. There are five possibilities that samba may use:

• Share Level Security
  Share level security controls access to resources via one or more passwords. When connecting to a share with share level security, the client does not send a username. Instead, Samba will attempt to guess the username and then verify the password sent against possible usernames for a match. Because UNIX security is vastly different from NT, this option is not a great option. More information can be found in the secureity_level.txt file.
• User Level Security
  With user level security, the client send a username and password which Samba will verify. If encrypted passwords are being used, samba will search it's own smbpasswd file. If not, it will search /etc/passwd. Windows98, WindowsNT 4 SP3, and Windows95 with the SMB Update all require encrypted passwords. This may be disabled in the registry (not recommended).
• Server Level Security
  This is esentially the same as user level security, except that samba will rely on another server to authenticate the user. This may be another samba server or an NT Server.

• Domain Level Security
  This option relies on the Domain's Primary Domain Controller to authenticate users. This is only used if there is a PDC, and Samba is not it.

• Guest Access
  Additionally, each share can be granted guest access, and no authentiation is done