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I am maintaining a samba server for an office environment. So far, whenever there had to be a new user, I called the person over and let him type in his samba password on my console, after I typed smbpasswd -a username. I don't want to know any of the passwords.

For the unix passwords, I just let them create a password digest (e.g. http://www.askapache.com/online-tools/htpasswd-generator/) in advance and edit the password file later with vipw -s.

Now I have a remote colleague who can't come over to type in his password, but I still don't want to know it at all.

How can I edit the samba password without actually knowing the password itself, but just a digest?

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Let him send you pass.txt which contains his plain password encrypted by GnuPG.

echo "secret-samba-password" | gpg -ca --cipher-algo AES256 >pass.txt

Then you can blindly decrypt pass.txt and feed it to smbpasswd in the script:

PASS=$(gpg -qd pass.txt)
(echo $PASS; echo $PASS) | smbpasswd -sa username

As example above you can use symmetric encryption (gpg -c) with a temporary passphrase shared beforehand, but public key encryption against your key is much more desirable at the actual practice.

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    That is a really good work around! I like it very much and gonna do it that way! But I could still see the password once it's not encrypted anymore. Is there no way to do it so that I wouldn't even be able to see the password, ever?
    – Preexo
    Commented Jun 2, 2015 at 6:47

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