What a hard dance the SaMBa is!

I recently installed Leopard on a late-model G4 for use as a media machine at home and I have to say it works really well (I wish the step-upgrade to Vista had been as nice!) but I've discovered a few things about how Samba/SMB/CIFS works under various OSes;

1. Leopard gives you a warning when you share a folder over SMB - something like 'your password will be stored and shared as plain-text' - very good I thought, warning you about the problem of pre-Kerberos SMB (v.3 SMB in Windows?) - but no - it ONLY supports Kerberos authentication! This effectively limits you to using only post Win2k boxes to access Leopard. My PDA can't pluck files off Leopard and the Mac can't get files off my Linux-based NAS.
   
2. When you mount an SMB share from Leopard using an XP machine (jn the case of my MediaPortal PVR) it will only accept the first authentication approach - i.e if you're not logged into the Windows box with an account that Leopard recognises then you can't supply any other credentials. Since Leopard can't integrate into a Windows domain this is a major drop-off.
3. Vista won't talk to pre-V2 Samba servers - apparently the rumour that SMB 2 in Vista was engineered specifically to 'f**k with Samba' might be true! Listen to the edition of Floss Weekly (in the title link) - you'll learn more about Samba/SMB/CIFS than you currently know.