The administration of Windows user, group, and machine accounts in the Samba domain-controlled network necessitates interfacing between the MS Windows networking environment and the UNIX operating system environment. The right (permission) to add machines to the Windows security domain can be assigned (set) to non-administrative users both in Windows NT4 domains and Active Directory domains.

The addition of Windows NT4/2kX/XPPro machines to the domain necessitates the creation of a machine account for each machine added. The machine account is a necessity that is used to validate that the machine can be trusted to permit user logons.

Machine accounts are analogous to user accounts, and thus in implementing them on a UNIX machine that is hosting Samba (i.e., on which Samba is running), it is necessary to create a special type of user account. Machine accounts differ from normal user accounts in that the account name (login ID) is terminated with a $ sign. An additional difference is that this type of account should not ever be able to log into the UNIX environment as a system user and therefore is set to have a shell of /bin/false and a home directory of /dev/null. The machine account is used only to authenticate domain member machines during start-up. This security measure is designed to block man-in-the-middle attempts to violate network integrity.