[Samba] Building Samba RPMs on CentOS 7 as an alternative to Sernet packages

[Darren Bowen]

Hi there.

I'm new to Samba 4 and looking to use it as an alternative to a Microsoft
Active Directory domain controller. We run on CentOS 7 and I've read that
the Samba packages for this distro don't support AD due to using MIT
Kerberos instead of Heimdal. This lead me to trying the Sernet pacakges,
which work great, but they are restricted to 7.2 for the free version. I'm
keen not to end up on an unsupported version so have been looking at
building Samba from source instead.

I managed to build and install Samba from source without too much trouble,
it works great but it takes a long time to build and isn't overly suitable
for our configuration management system (Puppet). I'd prefer to be able to
build RPMS and install them on any machine (running the same version of
CentOS), but I'm not sure how to do this or whether it may be beyond my
level of experise as I don't have any experience building RPM packages.

I'm looking for some advice on how to build RPMs from source, can I use the
various packaging scripts which are included with the release (I couldn't
find any details on how to use these) or do I need to configure the
packaging system from scratch?