samba and inetd problems

[Ron Alexander]

I should have explained that although I have been in the computer biz for 33
years, I am new to Unix and all things to do with communications
(intentionally).

I also probably mislead you when I said recommended. What I should have said
is that several books document how to start the Samba daemons from either
inetd or startup scripts (I think that is the proper Unix phrase).

The specific books are:
Using Samba		                  pg. 46-48
Samba, Unix & NT Internetworking	pg. 24-28, 93, 260
Teach Yourself Samba in 24 hours	pg. 55-56

I now understand that inetd is used for low traffic situations and other
technical reasons. VOS has the concept of a boot script, and I have no
problem starting it that way.

It also appears that there is a bug in the POSIX port that is happening in
parallel. I just got notified that they are restarting the stcp stack and I
can test again.

If anyone is interested, I will post the results of further testing. Please
respond in the affirmative if you are interested.

Thanks,
Ron

-----Original Message-----
From: James Sutherland [mailto:jas88 at cam.ac.uk]
Sent: May 19, 2000 11:43 AM
To: Ron Alexander
Cc: Multiple recipients of list SAMBA-TECHNICAL
Subject: RE: samba and inetd problems


On Fri, 19 May 2000, Ron Alexander wrote:

> Can someone PLEASE tell me if using inetd is the recommended way or not?

If you can run it as a daemon, rather than through inetd, do so (unless
it's a VERY low traffic daemon; I run the ftpd on my workstation that
way, since I only use FTP for occasional transfers to/from it.)

> According to all the books I have, it is recommended.

By whom?? Specifically Samba books?

> I don't understand how it could work however, since inetd would hear the
> connection requests on port 139 before the smb daemon would. As a result,
> you would get more smb daemons starting and failing becuse they could not
> lock the smbd.pid file.

No. It's a straight choice: EITHER inetd listens on port 139, then loads
one smbd per request (connection), OR smbd does it all alone. You never
get both smbd and inetd listening on port 139 simultaneously: one or
other will get an error that the address is in use.

I'd run as a normal daemon; the overhead of running via inetd is too much
for normal servers, I suspect...


James.