[Samba] Starting with Samba - first impressions

[Fran Fabrizio]

I promised John yesterday that I would document my experiences as I tried 
to convert this ugly two-headed network I've inherited (see thread titled 
"Having Samba integrate/replace existing mixed Unix/Windows network" from 
yesterday) into an easy-to-manage Samba-based network.  I took the first 
baby steps and I thought that it would be interesting/useful to post 
semi-regularly here so that those of you who are also looking to get 
started with Samba can see what someone else is going through, and those of 
you who are so close to the project that you might take some things for 
granted can see some of the issues that one user is dealing with. :-)  If 
this isn't useful for anyone, I'll stop sending them. Anyhow, here's day 
one....

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Day 1 - Creating a testbed, installing Samba, and a quick proof-of-concept

I've decided that for my testbed I would use a laptop running linux as my 
Samba server, and I would use VMWare to put an instance of Win XP Pro as my 
client.  This way, I have a self-contained Samba network in a laptop that 
can travel with me and does not rely on any network connectivity to develop 
the Samba environment.  I thought this would be an easy part but one of the 
Redhat 9 ISOs that I downloaded from linuxiso had a corrupted package (disk 
2, the xpdf package - two separate downloads, two separate burns on two 
different computers, and both had the same flaw), followed by one XP Pro 
VMWare install hang in the middle.  As a result, it was nearly 5pm before I 
had the OSes installed correctly and was ready to download Samba.

Hopped onto samba.org and downloaded the 3.0.0 source.  Before unpacking, I 
removed all Redhat RPMs for samba.  I then proceeded to follow the 
instructions in the Using Samba book to do my config and install.  Knowing 
that down the road I wanted to play with all sorts of authentication 
options, I chose to configure Samba with PAM, LDAP, NIS+ as well as 
smbwrapper and smbmount and automount and syslog.  Configuration and build 
went fine, except it took forever (maybe 30 minutes) on the laptop so I 
hope I don't have to do this too often.  Install went fine.

I followed the book and created a small smb.conf that simply creates a 
share called "test" (/usr/local/samba/tmp).  I dropped a test file in 
there.  I then tried to see how the same thing would look from SWAT....

Bump #1.  I followed the book.  I checked /etc/services for the swat entry 
(it was there already).  I then added a swat file to /etc/xinetd.d/ 
directory as per the book.  /bin/kill -HUP -a xinetd.  Logs show that it 
restarted ok.  Open browser, go to http://localhost:901/, it spins for a 
while, then connection refused.  Try again, connection 
refused.  Double-check all files, notice that the path the book had me 
enter (/usr/local/samba/bin/swat) is wrong - it's 
/usr/local/samba/sbin/swat.  Fix this, try again, connection refused.  Send 
more HUP signals to xinetd, nothing seems to work.  netstat doesn't 
indicate anything listening on port 901.  I never did get Swat running but 
I am a text config kind of guy anyhow and I was anxious to get on, so I put 
it aside for another day after about 15 minutes and a coupel of fruitless 
google searches.

I fired up the daemons and they started fine.  I did an smbclient -U% -L 
localhost a few times, the test share was listed, everything looked just 
like the book said it would except (Bump #2) where it says "Master" next to 
"Workgroup" it was always blank.  This was disconcerting but I decided to 
press on.  (About 10 minutes later I tried it again, and it was now listed 
as the laptop's name.  I guess it just takes a while to make itself known)

The book suggested that I create a user on the Windows client specifically 
for testing, so I created a user/pass of samba/samba.  I then remembered to 
go back to the Samba server and add this with smbpasswd (I guess this is 
what is referred to as the matching encrypted passwords issue).  I hit Bump 
#3 here.  I would try smbpasswd -a samba, enter in the password, and it 
would tell me that it failed to initialise a SAM_ACCOUNT.  After about 5 
tries of this, I googled again, and learned that the user must already 
exist as a Unix account.  So I added a local Unix user by that name, tried 
smbpasswd again, and all was well.  I wish the book made this a little 
clearer.

Once I got over that hurdle, I logged into XP as the samba user, popped 
open My Network Places....and it was blank.  However, after about 30 
seconds, I saw the test folder pop up.  This may simply be due to the 
less-than-stellar performance of XP inside VMWare on a laptop, or it might 
be another one of those "takes some time to announce itself" deals.  The 
display of Workgroup Computers worked flawlessly.

The share worked fine, I can copy files to and fro, all is well.  So, I'm 
calling it a night.  I think that was a good first step, and not very 
painful at all, so far so good.  If anyone has any pointers on the SWAT 
problem I'd like to at least get it working and take a peek at it.  I seem 
to have everything else worked out up to this point.  Looking forward to 
doing some more complicated things tomorrow.
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Hope someone finds this useful,
Fran