Samba Default smb.conf and a provision for file server roles.

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Tue, 2012-08-28 at 14:21 -0500, Ricky Nance wrote:
> 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'm not sure if the issue is distro-specific.  The distributions didn't
do this on their own, we helped them!  The examples/smb.conf.default is
the basis for some of this pain, and this much we can fix. 

>  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.

I think our very first step should be to examine the smb.conf.default
and remove entries that the vast majority of users do not need.  For
example, most of the browsing/master options I think should be removed. 

Then yes, we should look into running provision for the member server
case, and particularly once we merge the winbindd implementations, have
a 'samba will work it out' configuration based on just running 'samba'
and it spawining the right combination of other services based on the
smb.conf. 

Andrew Bartlett
-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org