[Samba] SerNet package spool directory

[Moray Henderson]

Karolin Seeger wrote:
>On Di, Dez 15, 2009 at 06:20:31 +0000, Moray Henderson wrote:
>> It would be useful if your 3.3.9 build (currently in recent) included
>> the /var/spool/samba directory - it just took me a while to figure out
>> why Samba printing wasn't working on a new EL5 server ;-)
>
>thanks for the hint!
>
>We packaged the /var/spool/samba directory in the past, but decided to
>drop it, because it's a 1777 directory which gives each user the chance to
>fill-up the /var partition. You could either use /tmp instead or create
>/var/spool/samba manually.

Hi Karolin,

Thanks for the reply.  If you're willing to review that decision, I think there are some new arguments in favour of including the spool directory in the package again.   

Using /tmp would not work these days because most systems tend to have SELinux enabled: smb_t cannot write to tmp_t without setting the boolean samba_export_all_rw, which should really only be done as a last resort.  Even creating /var/spool/samba manually is not as straightforward as it used to be, since you now need either "restorecon /var/spool/samba" or "chcon -t samba_var_t /var/spool/samba" to make it work.  There is already a file context for it set in the base policy, so the directory does get installed properly if it's part of an rpm, and that is the "expected location".

The partition debate has been going on for as long as partitions themselves have been around.  The current Fedora/RHEL install uses a small boot partition and a massive root partition for everything else, so there is no benefit in putting the spool directory elsewhere.  There was some talk on the anaconda list recently of switching to multiple partitions on larger disks, but with the size of modern large disks there would still be plenty of space on /var.

I'd vote for having /var/spool/samba there as a useable default, and if an individual sysadmin is worried about space in /var, they can still reconfigure it themselves.


Moray.
"To err is human.  To purr, feline"