Red Hat Knowledgebase

First you should create a group that all of your machine accounts will be members of. For example:

groupadd machines

Then enter the following command to add a machine account. Replace machine_name with the name of the machine you wish to add, and remember that the machine name must include the $ at the end.

/usr/sbin/useradd -s /bin/false -d /dev/null -g machines machine_name$

Some systems will not accept the $ as a valid character. If this is the case, add machine_name and then manually edit the /etc/passwd file and add a $ to the end of machine_name.

After this is completed you must create the corresponding samba account for the machine. Do this by entering the following command. Again, replace machine_name with the name of the machine. In this case you do not need to add the $ character.

smbpasswd -a -m machine_name