[Klug-general] Samba....

[Laurence Southon]

On 26/04/11 18:27, Peter Childs wrote:
> I've been asked to set up a File Server for a network of windows based
> machines, So I'm guessing Samba here..... I guess I need to set up
> Samba to run as a Windows PDC to sort out security and get all the
> Windows XP Pro (I think thats what they have) to join the "Network"
> Unless I can get the Samba server look like AD, but I'm not sure how
> to go about this... They want passwords and some "Security" over the
> files on the file server.....
>
You can have username:passwd security without a PDC, and unless the
workstations definitely are XP Pro they won't be able to join a domain.

It's a lot of work to set up the domain and then join each machine to
it. Personally I would avoid it, and another downside is that by default
Samba will use roaming profiles which will likely lead to trouble in the
long run. You can disable that but it's yet another setting to get dead
right.

> While doing a bit of reading up on doing this I worked out it should
> be possible to use Samba to do shared home directories on Linux and it
> should work *better* than NFS.

Yes, homes are easy to set up in Samba. Be careful where you place them,
and consider user quotas to stop disc usage getting out of control.
> 
> Also can I join the Wins bit of the SMB to my DNS and not have so much
> duplication of service.
Samba will become a WINS server, just put 'wins support = yes' in the
[global] part of smb.conf. Job done.

Samba is a leviathan, there are literally hundreds of possible settings,
any of which can trip you up. Good place to start is the official
documentation:

http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/

Feel free to fire questions, but a couple of tips on things that are
guaranteed to drive you up the wall at some point:

You can grant whatever permissions you like in Samba, but if the
appropriate Unix permissions are not in place, then they won't work, and
you won't know why.

Some config changes in Samba take effect straightaway, others require a
Windows logon/logoff or even reboot to take effect, so always worth
trying that before giving up.

Good luck!

LS
-- 
Laurence Southon
Tiger Computing, Bexley
www.tiger-computing.co.uk