Account Currently Disabled

Over the weekend I had a customer experience "Logon Failure: Account Currently Disabled" and "System Error 1331" error messages when attempting to access his newly upgraded RedHat server from a Windows XP client.

At first I thought this was because of the upgrade. He had done a fresh install and had copied over his entire /etc/samba directory. I thought that perhaps file formats might have changed from whatever version he had previously and that this was causing this strange error. I therefore had him remove the Samba passwords file and add the users again with "smbpasswd -a" but the problem still continued.

Microsoft references this at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/263936 but that didn't enlighten us. I asked him to check his Samba logs and that's where we found the problem: Samba wasn't actually starting. That was unexpected because something was at least answering the smb request: you wouldn't get an "account disabled" if nothing responded at all. I had him do an "lsof -i:139" and the answer popped up: Facetwin.

Facetwin is a Samba alternative that some people like. I agree that it has a nice terminal emulator, but I don't advise using this in place of Samba. That wasn't the customers intent either: he meant to just install the terminal emulator and not the full smb version. However, being pressed for time, he had delegated that task to someone else who wasn't aware that the full installation would conflict with Samba and prevent it from working.

Actually, it's fortunate that we found this. Had the installer configured basic accounts and shares, this would have been even more confusing as it would have seemed to be working at least partially.