Best Distro for Samba

[Eric Sisler]

Dan Pupek <dnkp at swbell.net>

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>Ok, I have a question.
>What is the best Linux distribution for Samba?
>Mandrake is giving me lots of trouble and I think it is because of all the 
>RPMs that install with it. Will Samba work better on a kernel built from 
>Scratch? Better on  BSD? Solaris? What is the best? I am setting up a file 
>server and maybe a squid proxy.

I'm not sure there's really a "best" distro for running Samba.  It depends 
largely on what you're comfortable with and what your needs are.  We've 
been running Samba here since 1998 on RedHat and I've been happy with it, 
barring some trouble with SMP kernels.

I don't have any experience with Mandrake but what kind of problems is it 
giving you?  If you're concerned about the number of RPM's installed out of 
the box, you can always 'rpm -e [packagename]' to remove them.  If you're 
not sure what a package does, 'rpm -qi [packagename]' will give you some 
detail and finally 'rpm -qa | sort | more' will list all the packages 
installed.  RedHat and other distros will typically install many packages 
you probably don't want/need but rpm makes it really easy to 
manage/remove/etc them.  Be sure to keep up with your vendors updated RPMs, 
especially the security related ones.

>Does squid have problems with Samba?

Squid and Samba are unrelated services.  That said, Squid & Samba ran 
side-by-side here on the same server for quite some time with no 
problems.  Squid will use as much RAM and disk space as you let it so you 
may want to go heavy on the RAM and put the Squid disk cache on its own 
physical disk (fast SCSI disk recommended).  Again, this depends on your 
setup - how many clients will you be serving with Squid and Samba?

>I have here ipchains cause samba problems?

Barring incorrect ipchains rules, no.  ;-)

>I'm not dumb, so be frank with me. I know somebody out there is running a 
>clean samba setup with all the bells and whistles how do you do it? Also I 
>run no NT or Win2000 only 98. So I would like samba to be the PDC. WINs 
>server if that's the best route.

We have Win '95 clients here, but are moving to a combination of NT 
workstation and 2000.  There are a handful of '98 clients but not many, but 
I don't think they're significantly different than '95 where samba is 
concerned. Samba can act as a PDC for 98/98 clients although interaction 
between a Samba PDC and an NT PDC/BDC is limited AFAIK - read the 
documentation on the samba website for more information.  I'd recommend 
enabling the WINS server portion of samba since WINS resolves by broadcast 
without a WINS server.

There's good documentation available on the Samba website ( 
http://www.samba.org ) as well as links to a number of excellent books 
written by members of the Samba team (thanks guys!).  "Using Samba" is 
available in HTML format from the O'Reilly website and is included as part 
of the 2.0.7 RPM I have.  Consider the FAQs and smb.conf documentation 
required reading before getting started.

-Eric


Eric Sisler
Library Computer Technician
Westminster Public Library
Westminster, CO, USA
esisler at westminster.lib.co.us

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