[Samba] Debugging Samba is a total PITA and this needs to improve

[Rowland penny]

On 21/05/2019 10:44, Sven Schwedas via samba wrote:
> Once again, something with Samba thirty bazillion components broke. Once
> again, my choices for logging are "nothing" or "15 MB/s spread of ten
> different files, because 'client authentication failed' totally needs to
> be lower priority than malloc debug info". Once again, none of these
> messages is actually able to convey what broke, where, why. Why is it
> impossible for Samba to provide useful error reporting? How is anyone
> supposed to use this in production? Why is the only way we have to
> troubleshoot is having Rowland and LPH bike shedding over smb.conf
> formatting styles for two weeks until the problem randomly solves itself?

Hi, its the ace bike shedder here ;-)

The main reason why we have to 'bike shed' is the lack of info provided. 
Many initial posts basically start with 'help, it doesn't work', no 
mention of what doesn't work or why, no mention of OS or version of 
Samba and sometimes getting information can feel like extracting teeth ;-)

You can get better logging, can I suggest you read the manpage for 
smb.conf: man smb.conf

Pay attention to these parameters: log file, logging, log level, max log 
size, syslog only, syslog

Having said all that, what OS and Samba version? What is in your 
smb.conf and most importantly, what isn't working with authentication ?

Rowland