[Samba] How to determine Samba Installation directory

[Mark Foley]

On Thu May  1 01:48:05 2025 Rowland Penny via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:38:40 -0400
> Mark Foley via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:19:57 Rowland Penny <rpenny at samba.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 15:40:06 -0400
> > > Mark Foley via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I'm building Samba from a scratch download from samba.org. 

[snip]

> > 
> > Will I have to provision from scratch? I can do so if needed, no
> > problem.
>
> Not if you 'join' a new DC to your domain.
>
> > 
> > I may have to rejoin domain members? I'll take them offline before
> > doing this.
>
> Again, if you are joining a new DC, then this shouldn't affect your
> Windows clients.

My plan is to first restore an image of the existing DC to a new machine, then
upgrade to the latest Samba 4.22.1 and see if that works with the current
config, sam.ldb, etc.

If not, I'll wipe and reprovision from scratch with the new 4.22.1, recreate the
policies, and join a test Windows 11 member.  If that doesn't fix the password
and redirected folder problems then it has to be a bug in Samba and I'll try
reporting again.  I'll also do a control test by creating a DC with a Windows
machine and verify password and redirection work using that platform.

Peter Smode reminded me how to figure out where the various Samba related
directory are with:

smbd -b | egrep "LOCKDIR|STATEDIR|CACHEDIR|PRIVATE_DIR"

So, when I install 4.22.1 I'll do:

./configure --with-system-mitkrb5 --prefix /var/lib/samba/ --sbindir=/usr/sbin/ --sysconfdir=/etc/samba/

> Are you sure I cannot get you to jump ship to Debian ? While
> problems can still occur on Debian, there are a lot more users of Samba
> on Debian, so you are more likely to get help.
>
> Rowland

Ironically, I did start out trying Debian back in 2012 and before that Zentyal
and OpenChange, the latter two being under constant development and moving
targets with respect to getting all the pieces/parts to work together.

Debian, at the time, required a lot of additional packages to be downloaded.
Samba as a DC was not supported by the standard install. It was work getting
all the reqired packages installed. I also had to remove so-called "helper"
programs to get the DC server to work. It did sort-of work, but according to my
notes Remote Desktop to the Windows 7 computers didn't work, nor would updates 
to the domain workstations work. Possibly Policies in general were a problem.

For the heck of it, I tried Slackware 14.1 which I had implemented elsewhere as
a web server. Slackware had a quite up-to-date Samba release at the time and it
worked as a DC right out of the box. I just had to figure out the normal issues
like what "provision" meant. And, since the target platform was already a
normal DNS server, I used the BIND9_FLATFILE backend which was some work, but
my choice, not a Slackware issue.

At this point, I don't think I want to go through the learning curve of
implementing a DC (or even a Linux host!) in Debian. And, as the other office
Linux servers are all Slackware, I'd rather not mix distros right now. Some
day, going to Debian across the board might become a necessity. 

I think for the most part my long-running plethora of question on this list have
not been Slackware specific issues and more Samba newbie issues. 

After releasing a stable version, Slackware does tend to fall behind in keeping
up to date on the latest Slackware and other apps. They start using and testing
newer versions in their under-development "Slackware Current" version which
eventually becomes the next stable release. I tend to stick which the official
stable release unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise -- which I
hope is the case with this present issue. 

Thanks for all your help --Mark