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INSTALLING SAMBA 2.0.7

This page is documents the steps I had to undertake to configure a Linux box to mount a Windows share via the smbmount command. To begin with I will give a little background as to the situation I was in and the configuration I had.  I needed to mount a Windows share on with smbmount.   I am running SuSE Linux 6.3 and the samba version was 2.0.5a and smbmount isn't supported until the 2.0.6 release.  In addition smbmount isn't a part of the actual samba package, it is actually a part of smbfs.  You can however recompile the source to include smbmount support.  I was also using the 2.4.test9 Kernel and to begin with I recompiled the Kernel to include support for smb file systems.

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1. Make sure your Kernel supports SMB File Systems; 

   One way to ensure this is to recompile it and update it while your at it click here for the HowTo.

2. Next get the latest source for samba that you can from www.samba.org

   It will be called: samba-latest.tar.gz

3. Once you have the latest version

   copy it to the /usr/src/packages/SOURCES directory

4. Next un-tar and un-zip the file

   Use the command:  gzip -cd samba-latest.tar.gz | tar xvf - 

5. After this is done it creates a directory called samba-2.0.7  (or which ever version you have)
6. Change to this directory and then the one below it called source
7. To see a listing of  the ./configure options  (configures it for your system)

   Use the command ./configure --help

   Click here for the output 

8. I needed smbmount to be include in the makefile, so I used the command:

   ./configure --with-smbmount

9. After configure is finished

   Enter the command:   make 

   Then the command:    make install

10. Next you need to configure your smb.conf if you don't have one already

    You can get the example file in /usr/src/packages/SOURCES/samba-2.0.7/examples/smb.conf.default

    View it here in HTML 

    Or download it here  (right click and save as "smb.conf") -8.5K

    Place you smb.conf in /usr/local/samba/lib or if you specified another directory with a ./configure option, put it in the specified directory

    You can test your smb.conf file for correct syntax after you make changes to it by using the command: testparm smb.conf while you're in the same directory smb.conf is strored in

11. If you didn't have an installation of samba on your computer prior to this or if your configuration changed you will need to alter your samba startup script

    Here's a copy of my script

12. After you have all you scripts correctly written with executable permissions, you need to restart the service:

    If you change the smb.conf file while the server is running then you will have to restart the service using the command:   kill -HUP "PID"   -the PID is the process Identification and can be found using the commands: ps aux | grep smbd   and  ps aux | grep nmbd, if the daemons are running it will return all the information for the daemon -the PID is on the far left.  Or you can use the command:  /etc/rc.d/smb restart (if your script is written to support restarts) -this reruns the script that initially started the server; besides restart, other options are start, stop, reload, and status -also note that this script can be found in different locations and can be called by different names according to your distribution -Samba can also be started by /etc/inetd.conf and you should read its man page for more information.  Or you can always take the easy way out and simply reboot.

13. After you restart the service you should be able to mount a windows share with the command:

    smbmount   //servername/sharename    /mount point   -U username

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