Samba 3.6 on RHEL 6

[jubeekabee]

Hello all!

I have a RHEL 6 box on a network with Windows 7 Professional boxes. I heard that Samba 3.6 (fedora version) can run on RHEL, which avoids having to change the lan manager preferences in Windows 7, since these are unable to be changed due to policy.

The problem I have is that I cannot figure out how to get 3.6 installed on the machine. I downloaded the tar.gz source file and did the ./configure-make-make install, to no avail...no smb service.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[atreyu]

Hello all!

I have a RHEL 6 box on a network with Windows 7 Professional boxes. I heard that Samba 3.6 (fedora version) can run on RHEL, which avoids having to change the lan manager preferences in Windows 7, since these are unable to be changed due to policy.

The problem I have is that I cannot figure out how to get 3.6 installed on the machine. I downloaded the tar.gz source file and did the ./configure-make-make install, to no avail...no smb service.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Hello and welcome!

Just use the software manager and the native repos to install it. Open a terminal. Change to the root user (su -), then enter the root password. Then do:

yum install samba samba-common

Next edit the config file, as needed:

vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

Then start/restart samba:

service smb restart

Now you can access this Linux box as if it were a Windows box w/network shares (sort of).

[jubeekabee]

Thank you for the quick reply, however this will only install version 3.5 which does not allow Windows 7 boxes to connect to it without changing the lan manager authentication level, which I cannot do, due to policy. I just found out that we have a machine running Samba 3.6 (from fedora) on RHEL 6 OS, however the person that set it up is no longer here. It would be nice if I could just take an image of that drive and restore it on the new box...but they have different hardware and hard drive sizes.

[atreyu]

oh, okay. then back to your ./configure;make;make install commands...where did you install it? Did you specify a prefix to ./configure? If not, it probably defaulted to /usr/local. Look in there.

Also, be sure to remove the samba/samba-common packages installed via yum, if you did that.

Edit: I have no idea about these packages whatsoever, but there are some binaries for samba 3.6 on this website:

http://www.enterprisesamba.org/

[jubeekabee]

I actually did not specify anything during ./configure, simply ran all of those commands in the Samba3.6.9/Source3 directory. I guess I can setup /etc/rc.local to run smbd, winbindd and nmbd from /usr/local/samba/sbin (they are in there), since they are not listed in chkconfig?

[atreyu]

I guess I can setup /etc/rc.local to run smbd, winbindd and nmbd from /usr/local/samba/sbin (they are in there), since they are not listed in chkconfig?

No, definitely do not do that. There should be a copy of the initscript, smb (or similarly named) somewhere in there. You can copy that to /etc/init.d/, make sure it is executable, then run:

chkconfig --add smb

If you can't find such a script, try this command:

find /usr/local -type f|grep smb

Note: did you see my edit in my previous post? Those binary RPMS might also be worth looking into, if you don't mind that they're not official Red Hat packages, of course.

[jubeekabee]

I did see your edit, let me try the copying of the initscript first and see what that does for me.

Thanks for all of your help so far!

[atreyu]

I did see your edit, let me try the copying of the initscript first and see what that does for me.

I see a copy of the script in the Samba source here:

samba-3.6.9/packaging/RHEL/setup/smb.init

[jubeekabee]

I copied that over to init.d and made it executable, tried to start the service and got an error. I'm wondering if I should just pursue imaging the machine that we have with 3.6 and restoring the image on the new machine. Does that sound logical? I would be going from 500GB to 1TB hard drive though.

[atreyu]

I copied that over to init.d and made it executable, tried to start the service and got an error.

What is the exact error? Paste/copy it here. It is likely something simple, like it has paths to the binary daemons hard-coded and they don't match up with where you've installed them.

I'm wondering if I should just pursue imaging the machine that we have with 3.6 and restoring the image on the new machine. Does that sound logical?

I would not go that route, but it certainly is an option. I prefer starting from scratch having a "clean" system w/no residual software or config files on it, and no extra software on it that I don't need. If I were in your shoes, I would first either:

1) troubleshoot why the samba you compiled from source is not working

2) use the enterprisesamba binary packages