I had the weirdest thing suddenly start happening last night that took several hours to finally figure out was a time-related issue.

I've got an Ubuntu box that uses pam_winbind to allow for logging into a machine using an Active Directory account.
Normally I connect with an SSH key, but once in when doing sudo -s I enter an AD password to become root. Last night that sudo -s suddenly stopped working.

Luckily I had another non-AD account that I could connect with, and sudo worked for that, so I could become root and poke around. The logs showed:

sudo: pam_unix(sudo:auth): authentication failure; logname=barry.pederson uid=14283 euid=0 tty=/dev/pts/0 ruser=barry.pederson rhost=  user=barry.pederson
sudo: pam_unix(sudo:auth): conversation failed
sudo: pam_unix(sudo:auth): auth could not identify password for [barry.pederson]

That was weird, I could log into other things though that used the same AD account, so I knew the password was right and the account wasn't locked out.

I hoped by the next morning, some cache thing would expire and I'd be back in business, but no dice.

Poking around some more I found if I disabled my SSH keys, I couldn't log in at all, so it was really a pam_winbind issue, not a sudo one. The logs for a SSH password login attempt were a bit more informative:

pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=xxx.yyy.zzz  user=barry.pederson
pam_winbind(sshd:auth): getting password (0x00000388)
pam_winbind(sshd:auth): pam_get_item returned a password
pam_winbind(sshd:auth): request wbcLogonUser failed: WBC_ERR_AUTH_ERROR, PAM error: PAM_AUTH_ERR (7), NTSTATUS: NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE, Error message was: Logon failure
pam_winbind(sshd:auth): user 'barry.pederson' denied access (incorrect password or invalid membership)
Failed password for barry.pederson from x.x.x.x port 50655 ssh2

WTF? I know the password's right, I've been typing it all morning into other systems. I even tried wbinfo --authenticate barry.pederson on this box and it accepted my passwords.

Much time was spent Googling, trying various tweaks to smb.conf, etc. Finally, I don't remember why, I thought to check the date with ntpdate -d my.ad.server and it came back with offset -338.308573 sec. Holy crap, that's more than 5 minutes! Even though ntpd is running.

Anyhow, once the clock was fixed to be closer to the AD server, logins and sudo started working again.

smbpasswd is a really old piece of software (9 years!) for generating NT/LM password hashes, suitable for use with Samba. It's in Debian/Ubuntu/Redhat repositories, and FreeBSD ports, and who knows where else.

Somehow it never got submitted to PyPi, but I took care of that today at the request of someone working on another Python module that wanted to use this as a dependency. Look for smbpasswd-1.0.2, or just easy_install smbpasswd if you're setup for that.

I changed the packaging slightly, so that the tarball extracts to smbpasswd-x.x.x instead of py-smbpasswd-x.x.x, and so bumped the version number to 1.0.2 just for the packaging changes. The library itself is unchanged.

However, I think you'd want to be very careful generating and storing LM hashes of user's passwords, they seem to be wildly insecure.

If your app can get by with just NT hashes, and you have a Python >= 2.5, you may be able to generate those using the standard Python library, and don't need this package at all. See the notes on my py-md4 page.