smbd on Linux and Windows Authentication

 A common set up is to have the Windows and Unix username and password match, so that you do not always have to type in your password when connecting to a Linux share.

In my case this just did not work out, even after I added this to my dmb.conf:

ntlm auth = yes

It still asked for my password.

After having fiddled around for almost a day, this was the solution: do not trust the smbd default, instead do explicitly state them like so:

ntlm auth = yes
lanman auth = no
client lanman auth = no

After this change, everything worked as expected. It beats my, why smbd does not seem to know its own defaults ;-)

Many solutions on the web mentioned that you could set the security policy on Windows to NTLMv2. While this works, it does not seem to be the right approach to me, as you will have to apply this change to every single machine. A change on the server side made much more sense to me.

Hoping that this may help others who run into the same issue.