Distribution specific smb.conf

[Ricky Nance]

Hey all, gonna hop on a soap box for a bit here, so I apologize in advance.
My complaint is the distro specific smb.conf being 'overly helpful'. I have
had several issues lately with people using these as a basis to setup
simple (generally anonymous) file sharing. The issue is they uncomment many
items that don't even pertain to their setup. In general you only need
about 4 or 5 lines under global to do this, most configs I have seen have
somewhere around 15-20 lines, many that actually hinder their setup. One
very specific thing I have seen is [global] containing lines like security
= share (which is now depreciated), others include interfaces = 127.0.0.1,
 and valid users = root. I have also seen in [share] writable = yes, and
while this is not wrong, I have see issues that were fixed by simply
changing that line to read only = no (a different code path as I understand
it).

Now, what I am proposing with samba 4 is that we use something that has
made my life much easier, provision, to generate this file and possibly
move away from distro specific configs. I understand that there may be
complications in doing this, but for the simple things it will make the end
user experience much better. I also understand that this may not work well
with something like a Samba 3 + LDAP setup, but to be honest that is
something that should be discouraged, unless there is some need for that
specific LDAP setup. I think there are many users that only use LDAP for
samba related purposes (I was one of them once), but lets face it, MOST
programs will read from Active Directory as good, or even better than, they
read from LDAP.

On that note with users only wanting to use the file sharing option of
samba, it does not make sense to me to install active directory. When using
the file server only, you typically only need to spawn smbd and nmbd,
however with samba 4 using the samba bin, I feel like samba should be
parsing the smb.conf and then deciding what to spawn, otherwise we will get
into a bad scenario with init files not working right.

Anyway, I'd like to get a little feedback on the list as to what direction
samba will be taking on this as well as what the users think of this
approach.

Thanks,
Ricky

PS. Sorry for the lengthy mail!

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