When I try to join the domain I get the message “The machine account for this computer either does not exist or is not accessible”. Whats wrong?
This problem is caused by the PDC not having a suitable machine trust account. If you are using the add user script method to create accounts then this would indicate that it has not worked. Ensure the domain admin user system is working. Alternatively if you are creating account entries manually then they have not been created correctly. Make sure that you have the entry correct for the machine trust account in smbpasswd file on the Samba PDC. If you added the account using an editor rather than using the smbpasswd utility, make sure that the account name is the machine NetBIOS name with a ‘$’ appended to it ( i.e. computer_name$ ). There must be an entry in both /etc/passwd and the smbpasswd file. Some people have reported that inconsistent subnet masks between the Samba server and the NT client have caused this problem. Make sure that these are consistent for both client and server.
