VanLUG Email Archive
There are three reasons. First of course is to keep unencrypted
passwords off your network. Second is that some sites may prefer
to keep separate passwords for Samba and for shell access, since
access to the system via a shell account exposes many more
potential security issues than mere file/print sharing access
does.
Finally, Windoze is much less annoying when using encrypted
passwords than it is about unencrypted - ie, with encrypted
passwords it will actually save the share password in your
.pwl file so it doesn't have to re-prompt you every time
you attach to the samba server. NT will use your current
account password instead of prompting you every time you
connect to the samba server.
- Alan