To create a Samba account you must first have a valid Linux account for them, so create in your etc/passwd file all the users you want to connect to your Samba server first before generating the smbpasswd file of Samba.

1. To add a new users to your /etc/passwd file, use the following commands:

                 [root@deep ] /# useradd smbclient
               

2. To add password for users in your /etc/passwd file, use the following commands:

                 [root@deep ] /# passwd smbclient
               

   
                 Changing password for user smbclient
                 New UNIX password:
                 Retype new UNIX password:
                 passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully
               

Once we have added all Samba clients in our /etc/passwd file on the Linux server, we can now generate the smbpasswd file from the /etc/passwd file. To generate smbpasswd file from the /etc/passwd file, use the following commands:

          [root@deep ] /# cat /etc/passwd | mksmbpasswd.sh > /etc/smbpasswd
        

Finally, the last step we must perform is to create the Samba user account in our /etc/smbpasswd file before we are able to use it. To create the Samba user account, use the following commands:

          [root@deep ] /# smbpasswd -a smbclient  
        

          New SMB password:
          Retype new SMB password:
          Added user smbclient.
          Password changed for user smbclient.
        

Don't forget to change the permission of your new smbpasswd file to be readable and writable only by the super-user root, and nothing for group and other 0600/-rw------- This is a security measure.

          [root@deep ] /# chmod 600 /etc/smbpasswd
          [root@deep ] /# testparm    
        

See ENCRYPTION.txt in samba/doc/texts/ for more information.