[Samba] Re: Problem moving Samba shares to newly installed drive

[Jeff Umbach]

cp -R will not preserve the permissions, cp -Rp will.

Daniel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have been working on a RedHat machine that is a PDC for a Windows network
> running XP clients.
> 
> The system has the following shares defined in /etc/samba/smb.conf:
> 
> /home/netlogon
> /home/profiles
> /public (FYI /public is a symbolic link to /home/public)
> /home/share1
> /home/share2
> 
> They are all on the /home partition which is on the main system drive, which
> is full.
> 
> I have installed a second drive, made an ext2 file system, and mounted the
> drive as 1 large partition called /share.
> 
> I then copied all the data from the /home partition to the /share drive via
> ( cp -R /home/* /share ).
> 
> I then edited the paths for the shares listed above in /etc/samba/smb.conf,
> changing any references to /home to /share.  I deleted the /public symbolic
> link, and changed the share path for that share to /share/public
> 
> Restarting Samba resulted in the client machines (all running XP) logging in
> and receiving an error that their profiles could not be found.
> 
> I quickly reverted everything back to the way it was to make sure all was
> well, which it was.
> 
> I then tried just changing the location of the /public share, by changing
> the path in smb.conf from /public to /share/public, expecting that the users
> would be able to login, their home directories would be full, but the
> 'public' share would be on the new large drive at least.
> 
> But doing just this also resulted in them receiving the error that their
> roaming profile could not be located.
> 
> I had also tried not mounting the /home partition on the primary drive, and
> mounting the new drive ( /dev/sdb ) as /home expecting this would work and
> would result in me not needing to edit anything in /etc/samba/smb.conf -
> which was also wrong - I got the same results, profiles could not be found.
> 
> So I reverted everything back to the old drive, but created a new share in
> smb.conf called 'new' and set its path to /share (the new drive) and this
> worked, it was happy to leave existing shares in the original location and
> have a new share in the new location.
> 
> This at least gave the people a new spot to put their data, but was not what
> they were after.
> 
> 
> 
> My questions are:
> 
> 1)  The first thing I noticed is that when I copied everything over from the
> old drive to the new, all the permissions, ownership & group information was
> lost.  Everything was owned by root.  Manually changing the permissions for
> the /share/profile folder to make them match the original made no
> difference.  What did I do wrong ( cp -R /home/* /share ) that did not copy
> the permissions / ownership info over?
> 
> 2)  Why would changing the location of the 'public' share result in people
> not being able to login, when their profiles and the 'netlogon' share were
> still defined as being on the old drive?
> 
> 3)  Searching for smb.conf resulted in several copies of it floating around
> the place, most of them in folders that included 'example' in the path.  Is
> it possible that Samba could be looking at multiple copies of this?  Where
> is Samba told which smb.conf to look at?
> 
> 4)  If you can spot where I have errored, please point it out.  If I can
> provide more info, please let me know, I've tried to be as precise as
> possible.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Daniel
> 
>