Once you have configured your smb.conf file, you can test for "internal correctness" of smb.conf using the testparm command. On a typical SAMBA system, running such a command might produce:
[root@eigen samba]# testparm
Load smb config files from /etc/samba/smb.conf
Processing section "[homes]"
Processing section "[netlogon]"
Processing section "[pr]"
Processing section "[main_office]"
Processing section "[business]"
Processing section "[lab]"
Loaded services file OK.
WARNING: You have some share names that are longer than 8 chars
These may give errors while browsing or may not be accessible
to some older clients
.... (a listing of valid entries from smb.conf)
User maintenance in SAMBA
Users are handled internally by SAMBA. The command for adding new users to SAMBA is smbadduser. Running it with no options gives us its usage:
[root@electron samba]# smbadduser
Written: Mike Zakharoff email: michael.j.zakharoff@boeing.com
1) Updates /etc/samba/smbpasswd
2) Updates /etc/samba/smbusers
3) Executes smbpasswd for each new user
smbadduser unixid:ntid unixid:ntid ...
Example: smbadduser zak:zakharoffm johns:smithj
where unixid is the user id under UNIX, and ntid is the user id under NT (Windows). So, if we wanted to add a UNIX user 'fred' to SAMBA, and Fred's SMB user name was 'fredjarvis', the command we would use would be:
smbadduser fred:fredjarvis
Typically, you will keep NT user names the same as their UNIX counterpart, which simplifies the smbadduser command greatly:
smbadduser fred:fred
Note that, unlike UNIX's useradd, smbadduser allows you to add multiple users at a time for SAMBA.
To change a SAMBA users password, use smbpasswd. The general usage for smbpasswd is
smbpasswd username
which will allow you to change the password for 'username'.
SAMBA Starting and Restarting
SAMBA can be started any number of ways. However, if you are running a standard Linux server, the best way is to simply start the service as listed in the init scripts. Under Red Hat 7.3 this file is located here:
/etc/init.d/smb
To start (or restart) SAMBA, simply pass the option 'restart'
[root@eigen samba]# /etc/init.d/smb restart
Once your server is running, you can cause SAMBA to reload its configuration file and restart by sending it the SIGHUP command (which we covered in process control). Simply find the process associated with smbd (the SMB Daemon):
[root@electron samba]# ps aux | grep smbd
root 1330 0.0 0.2 4884 1588 ? S 08:55 0:00 smbd -D
