HOW TO INSTALL AND TEST SAMBA ============================= STEP 0. Read the man pages. They contain lots of useful info that will help to get you started. If you don't know how to read man pages then try something like: nroff -man smbd.8 | more STEP 1. install a smb client. There are several, eg: Pathworks, Lanmanager for DOS, Windows for Workgroups, Windows95, Lanmanager for Windows, Lanmanager for OS/2, Windows NT come to mind. Lanmanager for dos is available via ftp from ftp.microsoft.com in bussys/MSclient/dos/. Please read the licensing stuff before downloading. Use the TCP/IP option in the client. Add your server to the \etc\lmhosts (or equivalent) file on the client. Note that your client must support TCP/IP. All the clients that I know of do, but with many TCP/IP is not installed by default. With some you have to get an optional add-on to support TCP/IP. The add-ons for windows for workgroups, dos and OS/2 are available via anonymous ftp from ftp.microsoft.com. The TCP/IP package for WfWg is available from ftp.microsoft.com as the file /peropsys/windows/public/tcpip/wfwt32.exe STEP 2. Install Samba on a unix box. To do this, first edit the Makefile. You will find that the Makefile has an entry for most unixes and you need to uncomment the one that matches your operating system. You should also edit the section at the top of the Makefile which determines where things will be installed. You need to get this right before compilation as Samba needs to find some things at runtime (smbrun in particular). There are also settings for where you want your log files etc. Make sure you get these right, and that the directories exist. Then type "make". This will create smbd, nmbd and smbclient. Once it's successfully compiled you can use "make install" to install the binaries and manual pages. You can separately install the binaries and/or man pages using "make installbin" and "make installman". Note that if you are upgrading for a previous version of Samba you might like to know that the old versions of the binaries will be renamed with a ".old" extension. You can go back to the previous version with "make revert" if you find this version a disaster! STEP 3. Create the smb configuration file. There is a sample configuration file called smb.conf.sampl supplied with the distribution. It has lots of comments on some of the available options. See the man page for all the options. The simplest useful configuration file would be something like this: [homes] guest ok = no read only = no which would allow connections by anyone with an account on the server, using either their login name or "homes" as the service name. Note that "make install" will not install a smb.conf file. You need to create it yourself. You will also need to create the path you specify in the Makefile for the logs etc, such as /usr/local/samba. Make sure you put the smb.conf file in the same place you specified in the Makefile. STEP 4. Test your config file with testparm It's important that you test the validity of your smb.conf file using the testparm program. If testparm runs OK then it will list the loaded services. If not it will give an error message. STEP 5. Starting the smbd and nmbd. You must choose to start smbd and nmbd either as daemons or from inetd. Don't try to do both! Either you can put them in inetd.conf and have them started on demand by inetd, or you can start them as daemons either from the command line or in /etc/rc.local. See the man pages for details on the command line options. The man advantage of starting smbd and nmbd as a daemon is that they will respond slightly more quickly to an initial connection request. This is, however, unlilkely to be a problem. Step 5a. Starting from inetd.conf Look at your /etc/services. What is defined at port 139/tcp. If nothing is defined then add a line like this: netbios-ssn 139/tcp similarly for 137/udp you should have an entry like: netbios-ns 137/udp Next edit your /etc/inetd.conf and add two lines something like this: netbios-ssn stream tcp nowait root /usr/local/samba/smbd smbd netbios-ns dgram udp wait root /usr/local/samba/nmbd nmbd The exact syntax of /etc/inetd.conf varies between unixes. Look at the other entries in inetd.conf for a guide. NOTE: Some unixes already have entries like netbios_ns (note the underscore) in /etc/services. You must either edit /etc/services or /etc/inetd.conf to make them consistant. NOTE: On many systems you may need to give the nmbd a -B parameter to specify the broadcast address of your interface. Run ifconfig as root if you don't know what the broadcast is for your net. nmbd tries to determine it at run time, but fails on some unixes. See the section on "testing nmbd" for a method of finding if you need to do this. !!!WARNING!!! Many unixes only accept around 5 parameters on the command line in inetd. This means you shouldn't use spaces between the options and arguments, or you should use a script, and start the script from inetd. Restart inetd, perhaps just send it a HUP. If you have installed an earlier version of nmbd then you may need to kill nmbd as well. Step 5b. Alternative: starting it as a daemon To start the server as a daemon you should create a script something like this one, perhaps calling it "startsmb" #!/bin/sh /usr/local/samba/smbd -D /usr/local/samba/nmbd -D then make it executable with "chmod +x startsmb" You can then run startsmb by hand or execute it from /etc/rc.local To kill it send a kill signal to the processes nmbd and smbd. STEP 7. Try listing the shares available on your server smbclient -L yourhostname Your should get back a list of shares available on your server. If you don't then something is incorrectly setup. Note that this method can also be used to see what shares are available on other LanManager clients (such as WfWg). If you chose user level security then you may find that Samba requests a password before it will list the shares. See the smbclient docs for details. STEP 8. try connecting with the unix client. eg: smbclient '\\yourhostname\aservice' Typically the "yourhostname" would be the name of the host where you installed smbd. The "aservice" is any service you have defined in the smb.conf file. Try your user name if you just have a [homes] section in smb.conf. For example if your unix host is bambi and your login name is fred you would type: smbclient '\\bambi\fred' NOTE: The number of slashes to use depends on the type of shell you use. You may need '\\\\bambi\\fred' with some shells. STEP 9. Try connecting from a dos/WfWg/Win95/NT/os-2 client. Try mounting disks. eg: net use d: \\servername\service Try printing. eg: net use lpt1: \\servername\spoolservice print filename Celebrate, or send me a bug report! TESTING NMBD ============ As of version 1.7.00 it is possible to test nmbd to see if it is correctly installed. This can also test to see if it can auto-detect your broadcast address. Under some operating systems you can only test the broadcast part if running as root. You can test other functionality from a non-root account. To test from root use: nmbd -L TESTNAME where TESTNAME is the netbios name you wish to test. This would typically be the hostname of the unix host where you installed nmbd. It should return the IP address of the host you are looking for. If it doesn't then something is wrong with your nmbd configuration. (It is also possibe that you have a net configuration that doesn't send broadcasts to itself. Some Linux configurations do this.) If it fails then it could mean it is not correctly detecting your broadcast address or netmask. You will then need to supply the -B and -N parameters. See the nmbd man page for details. It has succeeded if somewhere in the output is a line like: ww.xx.yy.zz HOSTNAME which means it managed to look the IP correctly. To test from a non-root account use: nmbd -B HOSTNAME -L TESTNAME where hostname is the host name of the host where nmbd is installed and TESTNAME is the name you want to test. Typically this would be the same as HOSTNAME. NAME RESOLUTION =============== Probably the most common problem people have when installing Samba is getting name resolution to work. This is usually caused by incorrect settings for nmbd. One solution is to use nmbd as a WINS server, instead of using name resolution by broadcast. To do this you need to enter the IP address of the Samba server in the WINS section of your WfWg, Win95 or WinNT TCP/IP setup. As a last resort you can use a lmhosts file on the PC to resolve names, as long as you enable lmhosts name resolution in the right dialog box. This doesn't lend itself very well to update, however. The best solution is, however, to fix the nmbd setup. Experimentation and careful reading of the Samba docs should help. CHOOSING THE PROTOCOL LEVEL =========================== The SMB protocol has many dialects. Currently Samba supports 4, called CORE, COREPLUS, LANMAN1, LANMAN2 and NT1. You can choose what protocols to support in the smb.conf file. The default is NT1 and that is the best for the vast majority of sites. In older versions of Samba you may have found it necessary to use COREPLUS. The limitations that led to this have mostly been fixed. It is now less likely that you will want to use less than LANMAN1. The only remaining advantage of COREPLUS is that for some obscure reason WfWg preserves the case of passwords in this protocol, whereas under LANMAN1, LANMAN2 or NT1 it uppercases all passwords before sending them, forcing you to use the "password level=" option in some cases. The main advantage of LANMAN2 and NT1 is support for long filenames with some clients (eg: smbclient, Windows NT or Win95). See the smb.conf manual page for more details. Note: To support print queue reporting you may find that you have to use TCP/IP as the default protocol under WfWg. For some reason if you leave Netbeui as the default it may break the print queue reporting on some systems. It is presumably a WfWg bug. PRINTING FROM UNIX ================== To use a printer that is available via a smb-based server from a unix host you will need to compile the smbclient program. You then need to install the script "smbprint". Read the instruction in smbprint for more details. There is also a SYSV style script that does much the same thing called smbprint.sysv. It contains instructions. LOCKING ======= One area which sometimes causes trouble is locking. There are two types of locking which need to be performed by a SMB server. The first is "record locking" which allows a client to lock a range of bytes in a open file. The second is the "deny modes" that are specified when a file is open. Samba supports "record locking" using the fcntl() unix system call. This is often implemented using rpc calls to a rpc.lockd process running on the system that owns the filesystem. Unfortunately many rpc.lockd implementations are very buggy, particularly when made to talk to versions from other vendors. It is not uncommon for the rpc.lockd to crash. There is also a problem translating the 32 bit lock requests generated by PC clients to 31 bit requests supported by most unixes. Unfortunately many PC applications (typically OLE2 applications) use byte ranges with the top bit set as semaphore sets. Samba attempts translation to support these types of applications, and the translation has proved to be quite successful. Strictly a SMB server should check for locks before every read and write call on a file. Unfortunately with the way fcntl() works this can be slow and may overstress the rpc.lockd. It is also almost always unnecessary as clients are supposed to independently make locking calls before reads and writes anyway if locking is important to them. By default Samba only makes locking calls when explicitly asked to by a client, but if you set "strict locking = yes" then it will make lock checking calls on every read and write. You can also disable by range locking completely using "locking = no". This is useful for those shares that don't support locking or don't need it (such as cdroms). In this case Samba fakes the return codes of locking calls to tell clients that everything is OK. The second class of locking is the "deny modes". These are set by an application when it opens a file to determine what types of access should be allowed simultaneously with it's open. A client may ask for DENY_NONE, DENY_READ, DENY_WRITE or DENY_ALL. There are also special compatability modes called DENY_FCB and DENY_DOS. By default Samba does not implement these share modes. If you use "share modes = yes" then Samba will implement them using locking files in the "lock directory". See the man pages for details.