Still can't connect to Win98 resources using SAMBA from LINUX

I am still unable to connect to Win98 machines from LINUX (Red Hat 9) using SAMBA. I see a couple of other posts asking about LINUX-WIN98 problems, but almost no replies.

I've set encrypted passwords on in Samba on the LINUX host, and it can see the WIn98 machines, but when I type in the requested username and password, the dialog box says it's being transmitted unencrypted. Since the documentation I can find indicates that Win98 now requires encrypted passwords, I'm not sure how to fix the problem.

I am able to connect from the Win98 machines to the Linux machine, so I know the basic connectivity is there and that SAMBA is working.

If no one in the forum has any ideas on this, does anyone have a suggestion for other Samba documentation or resources? I'm hard pressed to believe I've discovered a new bug and suspect I'm just missing something in the configuration (or there's some problem with making this work with only Win98 machines).

Thanks!

Is anyone using SAMBA to connect to and browse Win98 client disks? I've looked through some SAMBA books and still can't find any reference to problems connecting from a LINUX machine to a Win98 machine.

I can see the Workgroup, the Win98 machines and their shared folders from the LINUX machine. But when I try to access the folder, I'm asked for a userid and password. The dialog box clearly states the password will be transmitted unencrypted. I thought that Win98 required encrypted passwords, which would expain the problem. But why doesn't SAMBA on the LINUX machine encrypt the passwords?

I have never seen a dialog box for network login saying "the password will be transmitted unencrypted" or similar on a W98 box.

How are you trying to connect? Chances that you are using "machinename" instead of "\\machinename"?

It's actually a dialog box on the LINUX system. I'm trying to get from the LINUX system to directories on the Win98 machines.

I'm using the "network servers" window which is the visual equivalent on RedHat of the Network Neighborhood on Win98.

I also tried making the same connection (from LINUX to Win98) using the SMBCLIENT command line program. with the same result.

I set up a new user on one of the Win98 machines and tried to connect to it using

SMBCLIENT //hostname/dirname -U userid%password

and got a similar resopns (ERRSRV - ERRbadpw ( Bad password - name/password pair in a Tree Connect or Session Setup are invalid.)

W95b and up require encrypted passwords by default. If your client says it is using unencrypted passwords, your smb.conf file probably tells it to... check it, it needs a line "encrypt passwords = yes". Is it there?

hth,
M.

Before I did my first post (about a month ago), I did the research that explained that Win98 uses encrypted passwords and set

encyrpt passwords = yes

in the smb.conf file. That's why I'm so puzzled by this, especially the assertion in the dialog box that "passwords will be transmitted unencrytped". I know that the smb.conf file is being read and used, because I've added other share disks on the LINUX side and they've shown up on the Win98 side.

I found the problem! Thank you, M. Hirsch - finally getting a response to my posts encouraged me to dig further.

I realized I had been misdirected by the dialog box. The dialog box asks for a userid and password, which I provided.

However, when I set up my shares in Win98 long ago, I had used the standard sharing mechanism, which is share access. That access requires you to provide only a password. When you share from one Win98 machine to another, Win98 recognizes this and prompts you only for a password.

The LINUX dialog box asked for both, and I kept trying to provide it, assuming I had done something else wrong.

Most of the SAMBA documentation I had found focused on the Win98 side. Today I found the O'Reilly SAMBA manual on the samba.org site, and that had a chapter on UNIX clients. It too focused on the Windows side, but it made the explicit point about share and user access.

So, I finally made the connection and responded to the LINUX dialog with only the password. That worked.

Still, it seems to me that the dialog box (I'm not sure which application generates it) should recognize this and only ask for a password. At least, it should not say it is transmitting passwords unencrypted when it isn't, because I focused on that in trying to fix the problem. But, I don't know if that's something that would be high on the developers' lists to fix.