On 27.7.2012, at 20.01, Simon Brereton wrote:

I was doing some research on setting up a samba server for my internal network (as an alternative to NAS). The setup looks easy enough, but then I got to thinking - I already have an internet host with an mysql DB that has usernames and passwords and it would be simpler all round to reuse that as the authentication server. That server is also running Dovecot, so I thought it might be simpler still to set up samba to authenticate using IMAP (the mysql server is not accessible on port 3306 anyway). A quick google resulted in a suggestion from Robert (who by now must be on every single list I'm on or rather vice-versa) about using winbind. I went off to the link he posted - http://wiki.dovecot.org/Authentication/Mechanisms/Winbind?highlight=%28winbi... and the problem is that seems to indicate bind and dovecot are on the same server.

That link is about Dovecot authenticating via Samba, not vice versa.

So, this not being the samba list notwithstanding, is it possible to use a remote dovecot host as an authentication back-end on a local samba installation?

No idea, but I think at least some Samba auth mechanisms probably want to have access to the plaintext password.