The madness of Samba setup on Ubuntu

Yeah, Ubuntu has thrown a few medium-sized annoyances at me recently. Tonight I wanted to set up Samba for sharing files with our local Windows machines. I've set up Samba dozens of times, but this is one of the more confusing episodes I've come across recently.

First of all I looked and saw that I had a package named "samba-common", and yet this did not mean I actually had Samba. A little confusing, but I just had to fire up Synaptic and search for "samba". So I installed the package and figured I'd have a serviceable default config. No dice. Rather than hack at /etc/smb.conf I decided to use swat, the Web control panel for Samba, which I've used, and I like. I installed it and tried to surf http://localhost:901/, the usual way to access swat. No response. I read the swat man page which said it runs through inetd. The man page specifically mentions editing /etc/inetd.conf I looked there and found but two lines, one of which was:

#<off>#swat            stream  tcp     nowait.400      root    /usr/sbin/tcpd  /usr/sbin/swat

How quaint! Old school inetd. How odd! Only 2 managed services. Oh well. I uncommented the line and then tried to restart it. Umm. no trace of inetd beside that config file.

At this point I did some googling. I just wanted a simple Ubuntu-specific HOWTO. I wasn't really in much of a mood for pulling out all the hacking stops. Google had almost nothing to offer except others bitching about how hard Samba is to set up on Ubuntu. I went back to work. I checked Synaptic and it turned out I had no inetd package installed. I selected xinetd, which is what I'd been expecting in a modern distro, anyway.

Now I had to configure swat to run behind it, but I was on my own. This is why a package such as swat should depend on a package such as xinetd, so that it can provide a plug-and play config. I'm pretty sure it does on Fedora Core. And certainly there shouldn't be phantom inetd.conf files floating around to trip up users.

I created /etc/xinetd.d/swat, with these contents:

# description: SAMBA SWAT
service swat
{
    disable         = no
    socket_type     = stream
    protocol        = tcp
    user            = root  #should use a more limited user here
    wait            = no
    server          = /usr/sbin/swat
}

And then dpkg-reconfigure xinetd to restart xinetd (and do any other magic needed after updating config). Finally I got swat up. If you want to use swat to administer Samba, you'll need a proper root password. No sudo to bail you out. If you log in as your user, you get a crippled, pee-on swat console for mere mortal users. On one machine I got my Ubuntu root by booting to single user mode and then setting the password. On this machine I used Automatix. Either way, use that root login to get the full plate of admin options. From that point it's fairly smooth sailing. swat isn't perfect, but it's as close as you get to simple Samba administration.

I hope this helps someone else. Maybe it's my imagination, but this seems to be much harder than I remember it ever being on Fedora Core or Mandrake. Oddly enough, I'm getting the impression that Ubuntu rocks for user desktop stuff, but gets really clumsy when it comes to the server management goods that should be bread and butter for Linux.

[Uche Ogbuji]

via Copia