I recently upgraded our file server’s version of Samba to 3.5.x. I was running a much older version (I think 3.3.x). Anyways, this upgrade forced a regeneration of Samba passwords. The FreeBSD handbook shows the use of smbpasswd… but notes the new way to generate passwords using pdbedit. to solve my problem, I moved the password related files in
/usr/local/etc/samba/*
to a backup location. Then I generated new password files using this new utility.
Lesson Learned: don’t fall behind on your updates AND be aware of backend support file changes.