[Samba] AIX Testers Needed.

[William Jojo]

Hello AIX folks,


I am changing the packaging of Samba for AIX. Presently Samba is built with
a truckload of static libs and bound up in a package that has no other
support for the supporting infrastructure.

What I'd like to do instead is make as much of the package dependant upon
shared libs and to allow for completeness of the package. In other words,
BDB, OpenSSL, OpenLDAP, SASL, KRB5, libiconv and gcc shared libs are all
included as *complete* packages; you'll have an LDAP server, Kerberos
support, SSL and Berkeley tools for hot backups and recovery.

You (should) need nothing else to make this work. The packages are
unconfigured; that's where you come in. Use the included example configs and
the mass of online documentation to setup your environment to your needs.

These packages are in BFF format and as such are installed using installp.
This will allow me to upgrade certain libraries along the way as the
technology and requirements change. The binary release notes will indicate
what is changing. My plans are to only change the shared libs about every 6
months or so and only when they are truly needed.

(This is actually part of a larger project to BFF many packages, which
include PHP, Apache, FreeRADIUS, the list grows a little each day, but is
about 43 a the moment. I've called the project "PWare" for "pSeries". I know
there are other sites doing this with Open Source Software, but this is
dependency responsive, driven by installp, more cohesive and is designed to
not interfere with, but also offer a replacement to, sites that already have
a /usr/local software repository.)

Anyway, a preliminary package is available at:

ftp://ftp.hvcc.edu/pub/pware

This includes Samba-3.0.23c with a temporary fix for an AIX panic confirmed
late last week with strptime (originally reported in Samba4) that is still
being worked on.

All software will install in /opt/pware. Be sure to examine the tree for an
understanding of where things are placed. One path in particular
"/opt/pware/samba" is special. This is designed to allow several versions of
Samba to be installed simultaneously for version testing and debugging.

The installp command will automatically increase the size of the filesystems
as needed. You should look to have at leat 100MB free on /opt after install
to make room for logs if you need to collect debug information. This may
require an adjustment by you.

Another thing to note is all packages were built with gcc on AIX 5.2 and
should work fine on AIX 5.3. (I'm already working on an AIX 5.3 only version
to take advantage of compiling on the native OS.)

You should, wherever possible and appropriate, upgrade AIX to recent levels:

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/support/unixservers/aixfixes.html


You must agree to a license agreement that basically is a disclaimer that I
and my institution will not be held responsible, that they may adhere to
GPL, LGPL and other appropriate licensing agreements (where applicable) and
that copyrights are held by their respective owners.


When the package is extracted use the following commands that assume you are
cd'd to the extraction directory.

To view the license agreement:

installp -lE -d.

To preview the install:

installp -agpYX -d. all

To install all packages:

installp -agYX -d. all

To remove all packages:

installp -u pware.*

To create a new table of contents:

inutoc .


You can also use "smitty install" to manage installp packages.

It is recommended that this software not be used immediately in production
and be tested first in your environment with non-production data. We *are*
using this style (in AIX 5.3 compiled form) in a production environment and
it is working wonderfully. Please provide any feedback regarding operation,
packaging or basic AIX support to me off-list unless it will benefit many.

Be sure to look at the README for some basic known AIX issues.


Cheers,

Bill