During some troubleshooting I deleted the machine account for a Linux server running samba from our AD 2003 domain. We are using Kerberos for authentication, and after I deleted the machine account I tried to join the domain again using

net ads join -U Administrator

But I keep getting Kerberos errors like these:

[2009/08/18 16:14:36, 0] libads/kerberos.c:ads_kinit_password(228)
     kerberos_kinit_password [email protected] failed: Client not found in Kerberos database
 Failed to join domain: Improperly formed account name

It appears as if samba remembers that it once had an account with the AD and keeps trying to reconnect to it, but I want to create a new account from scratch. I tried to delete all the .tdb files I could find as well as everything under /var/cache/samba but to no avail - it still behaves the same.

I also tried to create the machine account on the AD side, but then I get a similar error when I try to join, about failure to authenticate with the machine account - it looks like samba tries the previous machine account password and I don't know how to reset it, or even if I could figure out what samba uses - how to set it in the AD.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as at this point the only thing I can think about is to reformat and reinstall the machine, and I would really REALLY love to not do that.

Thanks in advance.