samba weirdly taking wrong password

["Dan B." <danb@kempt.net>]

Does anyone recall whether Samba had problems with truncating passwords,
or possibly with mixing up user IDs and/or passwords between the serving
side and the "clienting" side (mounting other machines' shares)?

I'm having a really weird problem:  the Samba server accepts a _wrong_
password instead of the expected password.

The wrong password that it is accepting is both:
1) the prefix (n-1 characters out of n) of the expected password (the
   password of a user account on the Linux system running samba) and
2) the password of a (supposedly) unrelated Windows user account on a
   Windows machine that happens to mount two shares from the Linux
   system and serve out two shares mounted by that Linux system.

I _think_ the Windows user account should be completely unrelated,
because I don't use any Windows domain or Samba equivalent.

However, both the Windows system and the Linux system have user
accounts with the same name U, and when Windows user U is logged on,
there is a Windows mount, using Linux user account U, of the samba-
served share.

That makes me wonder if samba is mixing up the two different user
accounts because they have the same name.

However, I don't see how samba in Linux would ever get the password
for the Windows user account:  Although Windows needs to pass the
password for Linux account U (which I gave to Windows when I set up
the mounting) to samba, it never needs to pass the password for
_Windows_ account U, right?

(The Linux machine mounts the Windows shares using a different
Windows user account (with a non-duplicate name), so that mounting
seems completely unrelated.)


The "clienting" I'm doing is mounting a samba-served share using

  mount -t cifs -o user=...  ...

and entering a password at the prompt.

When I enter the expected password (the n-character password of the
corresponding user account), it fails with samba's -13 permission
error.

When I enter the supposedly wrong password, it succeeds (and the
share is mounted).

That failure and success is the same whether the mount command is
issued on the sarge Linux machine running the samba server or is
issued on brand-new squeeze Linux machine.

(The sarge machine's samba version is 3.0.14a-3sarge11.)


Any ideas?


Thanks,
Daniel