[Samba] one opinion about searching samba docs for answers

John H Terpstra jht at Samba.Org
Fri Aug 5 21:50:39 GMT 2005


John,

I share your pain! I am the Samba Team documentation manager. I wrote much of 
the documentation. 

If you want to make me very happy just grant my wish that it might be easier 
to produce documentation that meets everyone's needs! 

After 18 months of near-full-time effort to create what we have it remains 
daunting to contemplate how much more effort it will take to complete just my 
short-list of things that "could be documented".

It would take a rather large book to document all the error and warning 
messages from the Samba source code. In fact, that is a project I have often 
contemplated, but backed away until someone will provide funding to make it 
possible to dedicate that time needed to systematically complete such an 
undertaking.

The only resource, other than the source code that you might refer to 
regarding the mechanics of the error conditions, why they are generated and 
how to solve them, is Chris Hertel's book that documents the entire CIFS 
protocol. Check on http://www.samba.org/samba/books for the link to this 
book.

Cheers,
John T.

On Friday 05 August 2005 15:13, John Stile wrote:
> It sure is hard to find info in the documentation/mailing list for a
> specific error.  If an error log message was created by smbd, nmbd, or
> winbind, shouldn't the documentation contain a description, cause, and
> possible solution?
>
> Specific case in point:
>           [2005/08/05 11:31:22, 0]
> nmbd/nmbd_browsesync.c:domain_master_node_status_fail(250)
> domain_master_node_status_fail:
>           Doing a node status request to the domain master browser
>           for workgroup MS at IP 192.168.40.20 failed.
>           Cannot sync browser lists.
>
> Searching the docs returned nothing for search strings:
>    nmbd_browsesync
>    domain_master_node_status_fail
>    Cannot sync browser lists
>
> The documents cover just about everything, except how to go from a log
> message to the relevant areas of configuration.  On the other hand, the
> documentation does a very good job of going from theory to high level
> samba planning (with some configuration details).  Shouldn't the
> documentation contain common error names, so that a search will direct
> the reader to the proper place?
>
> It might be nice if there was a good search-able mailing list archive at
> samba.org, but the archive doesn't search well.  Maybe because too many
> people abused the search tool because answers are not in the docs.
>
> So I end up using an Internet Search Engine only to find many hits with
> the same questions and no concise answers.
>
> I might be the only own who feels this way, but I would love to know how
> to fix it.  Every time I go through this, I have these thoughts.

-- 
John H Terpstra
Samba-Team Member
Phone: +1 (650) 580-8668

Author:
-------
2005:
	The Official Samba-3 HOWTO & Reference Guide, 
		Second Edition, ISBN: 0131882228
	Samba-3 by Example, Second Edition, ISBN: 013188221X

2004:
	Samba-3 by Example, ISBN: 0131472216
	Hardening Linux, ISBN: 0072254971

2003:
	The Official Samba-3 HOWTO & Reference Guide, 
		ISBN: 0131453556

Other books in production.


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