Samba - smbpasswd -a "Cannot locate unix account!"

[Roasted]

I'm dual booting Ubuntu and Kubuntu on the same system to try out KDE land more and more. As a result, I want to mimic my file server services on Ubuntu as best as I can on Kubuntu so there's no major downtime if I choose to reboot.

All of the users ARE on the system. I'm aware that Samba requires the user to exist on the local system as well as added to the Samba user list in order to function properly. But they are on the system - yet when I run:

jason@Skynet:~$ sudo smbpasswd -a user
Cannot locate Unix account for 'user'!
jason@Skynet:~$

[bab1]

I'm dual booting Ubuntu and Kubuntu on the same system...

Dual booting connotes the use of two (2) separate systems.

All of the users ARE on the system. I'm aware that Samba requires the user to exist on the local system as well as added to the Samba user list in order to function properly. But they are on the system - yet when I run:

jason@Skynet:~$ sudo smbpasswd -a user
Cannot locate Unix account for 'user'!
jason@Skynet:~$

If you are dual booting I'll bet you'll find that you have 2 passwd and 2 shadow files. They user may even have the same UID/GID and /home directory.

The local machine is not just a physical thing. A host is the running OS and the hardware.

[Roasted]

Hm, I'm not entirely sure I follow, but I'll just expand here on what I know and how my system is set up:

20gb Ubuntu
360gb /home/jason
20gb Kubuntu

All users that were added to Kubuntu also have the same UID as they did in Ubuntu. Everything in Kubuntu matches up. Permissions look fine, group assignment looks fine, etc.

I'm not sure why anything in Ubuntu would effect or prevent me from doing this same setup in Kubuntu, because the only thing shared by the two operating systems is /home/jason. They each have their own independent root directory.

[bab1]

Hm, I'm not entirely sure I follow, but I'll just expand here on what I know and how my system is set up:

20gb Ubuntu
360gb /home/jason
20gb Kubuntu

All users that were added to Kubuntu also have the same UID as they did in Ubuntu. Everything in Kubuntu matches up. Permissions look fine, group assignment looks fine, etc.

I'm not sure why anything in Ubuntu would effect or prevent me from doing this same setup in Kubuntu, because the only thing shared by the two operating systems is /home/jason. They each have their own independent root directory.

Well...

Lets use your terms. A system consists of the hardware and the OS; right? I this case you have 2 systems (these are known as hosts it the IT world).

That you use the same file system for the /home directory and the same permissions on both hosts is irrelevant to your problem. You have 2 kernels, and therefore 2 authentication systems. Thus, you have 2 sets of users.

The host Skynet (I hope you used 2 different hostnames) can't find the user your defined with your command

sudo smbpasswd -a user

How did you confirm that this user existed on this host?

I would use this

getent passwd|grep user

This returns the following for the user skeezix

skeezix:x:1010:1002:Skeezix The Kid,,,,:/home/skeezix:/bin/bash

To see the information on the GID and what groups the user skeezix is in you can use

getent group|grep skeezix

Try this when booting each instance of the OS (Kubuntu and Ubuntu) and see if there is a difference.

[Roasted]

Or - can I just delete the users off of Ubuntu/Samba and add them to Kubuntu/Samba? I believe I'll begin to use Kubuntu full time so I really don't need both instances of the service running.

[bab1]

Or - can I just delete the users off of Ubuntu/Samba and add them to Kubuntu/Samba? I believe I'll begin to use Kubuntu full time so I really don't need both instances of the service running.

What do you mean by that? Why do you have to delete users from one OS to add to the other? Only one OS is running at any one time.

What makes you think there are 2 unrelated, separate instances of smbd are running? Samba normally has 2 copies of smbd daemon running while listening on an idle host.