[Samba] Help

Mike Rambo mrambo at lsd.k12.mi.us
Tue Oct 22 11:48:00 GMT 2002


Ronald N Brown wrote:
> 
> I am a first time user of Linux. I purchased a copy of Red Hat 8 for the
> office. We have a Windows 2000 server and a network printer that I would
> like to use. The computer is saying that samba must be loaded so I
> downloaded the latest release of samba. How do I  install it.
> 
> Thanks Ron
> 

You shouldn't need to download and install Samba at all unless you
really want/need the latest code. All versions of RedHat come with Samba
as part of the distro. First check and see if it is installed...

[mrambo at mrambo mrambo]$ rpm -qa | grep samba
samba-2.2.2-3.2mdk
samba-common-2.2.2-3.2mdk
samba-client-2.2.2-3.2mdk

Keeping in mind I haven't actually seen RH8 yet, both RedHat and
Mandrake tend to break Samba down into packages of related files -
clients, the server, and files common to both. If you have packages like
the above you aleady have samba installed. All that is left is to
configure. Look for the smb.conf file in /etc/samba to handle that task.
Try 'man smb.conf' from a console (command prompt) to get some
documentation on what things mean. Mostly though, you only have to set
the workgroup at the top of the file. Most of the other default config
values are reasonable these days - particularly for simple
experimentation and learning.

Once you have it configured just make sure the Samba daemons are started
up. '/sbin/service smb status' will tell you the status in that regard.
If they are, and you've made changes you probably want to '/sbin/service
smb restart'. If they aren't you need '/sbin/service smb start'. I'm
sure you get the picture. '/sbin/chkconfig --list | grep smb' will tell
you the run levels in which smb is configured to automatically start at
boot (init 3 is boot direct to CLI, init 5 is boot to gui).

See where this gets you first. There could be other things that may
hinder proper operation (like incorrect /etc/hosts file set up) but they
can be dealt with when you get to them.

If you really are wanting to get to the latest version of samba I'd
recommend getting the rpm's from samba.org instead of the sources. If
you're new to Linux you might be better off to deal with rpm's initially
than to jump right in to compiling you own packages (just my 2 cents
:-). You can usually find rpm's on the samba download site that are made
specifically for all RedHat versions back to 6.2 as I recall.


-- 
Mike Rambo
mrambo at lsd.k12.mi.us



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