With all versions of Samba earlier than 3.0.11 the only account on a Samba server that could manage users, groups, shares, printers, and such was the root account. This caused problems for some users and was a frequent source of scorn over the necessity to hand out the credentials for the most security-sensitive account on a UNIX/Linux system.

New to Samba version 3.0.11 is the ability to delegate administrative privileges as necessary to either a normal user or to groups of users. The significance of the administrative privileges is documented in ???. Examples of use of the net for user rights and privilege management is appropriate to this chapter.