Written By:
Ying Zhang

Getting Samba

As of this writing, the latest stable version of Samba is 2.0.6. You will need the source distribution, it is called samba-2.0.6.tar.gz, grab it from the Samba homepage (http://www.samba.org).

First thing to do is extract the source distribution. Assuming you've downloaded it to /tmp, do this (you don't need to be root yet):
$ tar -zxvf samba-2.0.6.tar.gz
If you didn't get any error messages, you should have the extracted files in a directory called samba-2.0.6. The Samba source distribution comes with a bunch of packaging scripts. Of particular interest is the one that builds an RPM for us.

Let's put blind-faith into this script and run it (now you have to be root):

$ su
# chown -R root:root samba-2.0.6
# cd samba-2.0.6/packaging/RedHat
# sh makerpms.sh

That should take a little bit of time while it builds the RPM. If that failed then something is wrong, uh-oh time to read the Samba docs. If it worked, these files will be created:

/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/samba-2.0.6-19990228.i386.rpm
/usr/src/redhat/SRPMS/samba-2.0.6-19990228.src.rpm

Magical isn't it.

Okay, let's install this sucker:

# rpm -Uvh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/samba-2.0.6*.i386.rpm
INSTALLING SAMBA WITHOUT RPM's
Added By: RedRumJack

Okay I was helping Crash last nite via IRC installing Samba. The current NHF was giving him errors on Slack 7.0 trying to create the RPM's. Here is what I had him do.

New User and Group

Since we are using share level security, we have to specify a guest account. This user account will be called smbuser and it will belong to the smb group.

All the files that Bart and Lisa write to the data and public shares will be owned by smbuser and belong to the smb group.

If you have Linuxconf, use it to do the dirty work. Otherwise, use groupadd and useradd to create the new accounts.

1.Create the group smb

2.Create the user smbuser, the home directory should be in /home/public

Disable login on the smbuser account since no one will actually be logging in with that name.

Public Directory

We should already have a /home/public (since you created it just a sec ago). It should be owned by smbuser and belong to the group smb. Since files in this directory should always be owned by the smb group, we will set the SGID bit on it.
Everyone will have shared read and write access to this directory as well, so the permissions should be set like so:

# chown smbuser:smb /home/public
# chmod 2777 /home/public

Now every file that gets created in /home/public gets owned by the smb group no matter who creates it.

Data Directory

My data directory is /home/samba/data. This should only be accessible by certain people - those that belong to the smb group. So I set up the directory like so:

# mkdir /home/samba
# chown smbuser:smb /home/samba
# chmod 2770 /home/samba

# mkdir /home/samba/data
# chown smbuser:smb /home/samba/data
# chmod 2770 /home/samba/data

Again notice that I set the SGID bit on these directories so that anything created inside them get owned by the smb group.

Since I want access to this directory, I add myself to the smb group. Do this via Linuxconf or the usermod command. Or manually edit the /etc/group file if you feel brave :).

Check your hosts file

You should have an /etc/hosts file that maps host names to IP addresses. Mine would look like this:

/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain
192.168.0.1 homer
192.168.0.2 bart
192.168.0.3 lisa

Create an lmhosts file
The lmhosts file maps hostnames(or IP addresses) to NetBIOS (computer) names. Normally you would probably want the NetBIOS name and the hostname to be the same:

# /etc/lmhosts
localhost homer
bart bart
lisa lisa

It looks a little silly doesn't it, but the thing on the left-hand side is the hostname(or IP address) and the thing on the right is the NetBIOS name.

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