[WinPartners] generating windows passwords...?

[Jonathan Slate]

Hello Windows Partners,

I confess I joined this list to ask one specific question. I'm hoping 
someone out there has the windows expertise to steer me along the right 
course, I myself am a Java programmer working mostly in UNIX/Linux.

We have a registration web application we are developing where a user 
enters a password which we immediately encrypt (MD5) and save in the 
database. We don't store the plain text password for obvious reasons. This 
password is used for logging into the web based application and also the 
user's UNIX account.

Users also have Windows accounts, and currently those accounts are set up 
manually. We'd love to have the Windows machines check against our 
database for authentication, but we're not quite there yet. So in order to 
allow the user to get the same password in Windows (at least initially) 
I'd like to be able to generate a Windows encrypted password in my Java 
Web application. Then, in theory, that encrypted password would be made 
available to the people who manually setup the Windows account. Presumably 
there is someway they can create the account entering an already encrypted 
password...

So my question is, is there a way for me to create a Windows encrypted 
password on UNIX? What kind of password does Windows expect? Or am I going 
about this in the wrong way?

Thanks,

Jonathan Slate
Microsystems Technology Lab