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Setting Up Samba server

If you want to get started quickly, the CD-ROM packaged with this book contains both the sources and binaries of Samba that were available as this book went to print. The CD is a mirror image of the files and directories on the Samba download server: ftp.samba.org. On the other hand, if you want to download the latest version, the primary web site for the Samba software is http://www.samba.org. Once connected to this page, you'll see links to several Samba mirror sites across the world, both for the standard Samba web pages and sites devoted exclusively to downloading Samba. For the best performance, choose a site that is closest to your own geographic location. The standard Samba web sites have Samba documentation and tutorials, mailing list archives, and the latest Samba news, as well as source and binary distributions of Samba. The download sites (sometimes called FTP sites) have only the source and binary distributions. Unless you specifically want an older version of the Samba server or are going to install a binary distribution, download the latest source distribution from the closest mirror site. This distribution is always named:

samba-latest.tar.gz

If you choose to use the version of Samba that is located on the CD-ROM packaged with this book, you should find the latest Samba distribution in the base directory.

The source distribution of Samba 2.0 and above doesn't initially have a makefile. Instead, one is generated through a GNU configure script, which is located in the samba-2.0.x /source/ directory. The configure script, which must be run as root, takes care of the machine-specific issues of building Samba. However, you still may want to decide on some global options. Global options can be set by passing options on the command-line:

# ./configure --with-ssl
For example, this will configure the Samba makefile with support for the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption protocol. If you would like a complete list of options, type the following:

# ./configure --help
Each of these options enable or disable various features. You typically enable a feature by specifying the --with- feature option, which will cause the feature to be compiled and installed. Likewise, if you specify a --without- feature option, the feature will be disabled. As of Samba 2.0.5, each of the following features is disabled by default:

--with-smbwrapper
Include SMB wrapper support, which allows executables on the Unix side to access SMB/CIFS filesystems as if they were regular Unix filesystems. We recommend using this option. However, at this time this book went to press, there were several incompatibilities between the smbwrapper package and the GNU libc version 2.1, and it would not compile on Red Hat 6.0. Look for more information on these incompatibilities on the Samba home page.

--with-afs
Include support of the Andrew Filesystem from Carnegie Mellon University. If you're going to serve AFS files via Samba, we recommend compiling Samba once first without enabling this feature to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Once that version is working smoothly, recompile Samba with this feature enabled and compare any errors you might receive against the previous setup.

--with-dfs
Include support for DFS, a later version of AFS, used by OSF/1 (Digital Unix). Note that this is not the same as Microsoft DFS, which is an entirely different filesystem. Again, we recommend compiling Samba once first without this feature to ensure that everything runs smoothly, then recompile with this feature to compare any errors against the previous setup.

--with-krb4=base-directory
Include support for Kerberos version 4.0, explicitly specifying the base directory of the distribution. Kerberos is a network security protocol from MIT that uses private key cryptography to provide strong security between nodes. Incidentally, Microsoft has announced that Kerberos 5.0 will be the standard authentication mechanism for Microsoft Windows 2000 (NT 5.0). However, the Kerberos 5.0 authentication mechanisms are quite different from the Kerberos 4.0 security mechanisms. If you have Kerberos version 4 on your system, the Samba team recommends that you upgrade and use the --with-krb5 option (see the next item). You can find more information on Kerberos at http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www.

--with-krb5=base-directory
Include support for Kerberos version 5.0, explicitly specifying the base directory of the distribution. Microsoft has announced that Kerberos 5.0 will be the standard authentication mechanism for Microsoft Windows 2000 (NT 5.0). However, there is no guarantee that Microsoft will not extend Kerberos for their own needs in the future. Currently, Samba's Kerberos support only uses a plaintext password interface and not an encrypted one. You can find more information on Kerberos at its home page: http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www.

--with-automount
Include support for automounter, a feature often used on sites that offer NFS.

--with-smbmount
Include smbmount support, which is for Linux only. This feature wasn't being maintained at the time the book was written, so the Samba team made it an optional feature and provided smbwrapper instead. The smbwrapper feature works on more Unix platforms than smbmount, so you'll usually want to use --with-smbwrapper instead of this option.

--with-pam
Include support for pluggable authentication modules (PAM), an authentication feature common in the Linux operating system.

--with-ldap
Include support for the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). A future version of LDAP will be used in the Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) operating system; this Samba support is experimental. LDAP is a flexible client-server directory protocol that can carry information such as certificates and group memberships.[4]

[4] By directory, we don't mean a directory in a file system, but instead an indexed directory (such as a phone directory). Information is stored and can be easily retrieved in a public LDAP system.

--with-nis
Include support for getting password-file information from NIS (network yellow pages).

--with-nisplus
Include support for obtaining password-file information from NIS+, the successor to NIS.

--with-ssl
Include experimental support for the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is used to provide encrypted connections from client to server. Appendix A, Configuring Samba with SSL, describes setting up Samba with SSL support.

--with-nisplus-home
Include support for locating which server contains a particular user's home directory and telling the client to connect to it. Requires --with-nis and, usually, --with-automounter.

--with-mmap
Include experimental memory mapping code. This is not required for fast locking, which already uses mmap or System V shared memory.

--with-syslog
Include support for using the SYSLOG utility for logging information generated from the Samba server. There are a couple of Samba configuration options that you can use to enable SYSLOG support; Chapter 4, Disk Shares , discusses these options.

--with-netatalk
Include experimental support for interoperating with the (Macintosh) Netatalk file server.

--with-quotas
Include disk-quota support.

Because each of these options is disabled by default, none of these features are essential to Samba. However, you may want to come back and build a modified version of Samba if you discover that you need one at a later time.

At this point you should be ready to build the Samba executables:

# make

Now that the files have been compiled, you can install them into the directories you identified with the command:

# make install

Samba Installation Directories:

Directory Description
/usr/local/samba Main tree
/usr/local/samba/bin Binaries
/usr/local/samba/lib smb.conf, lmhosts, configuration files, etc.
/usr/local/samba/man Samba documentation
/usr/local/samba/private Samba encrypted password file
/usr/local/samba/swat SWAT files
/usr/local/samba/var Samba log files, lock files, browse list info, shared memory files, process ID files




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