Making Samba your Primary Domain Controller - Part Trois

Last time around we went over the basic choices for hardware/operating system for a Samba installation. In case you're curious, here is the hardware I'm using. Yes, it's elderly, but remember this is a test, and if this particular system ever sees use, it'll be on a home network. For a production environment, I'll use something newer, faster, and with a warranty.

• Compaq Proliant 800 (tower)
• Dual PIII 800Mhz processors
• 1 gig RAM
• 120 gigs storage (SCSI drives, hardware RAID)
• additional 300 gigs storage (IDE drive)
• FreeBSD 6.2
• Samba 3.0.24d

Although hardly cutting edge in terms of hardware, this is more than adequate for a small network with few users. Naturally, if this ever went into production, it would require a failover machine of some sort. There are many solutions, and I'll eventually get around to writing about that particular topic as well.

Installation of Samba on FreeBSD
This is trivial. First, update "ports". To do this, as root, change to the ports directory:
cd /usr/ports
Assuming you have your ports configuration file in your home directory, and it's named "ports-supfile", execute this command:

cvsup -g -L 2 ~/ports-supfile

Wait a bit. If it's been quite some time since you last updated ports, what a while. When it's done, execute these commands:

cd net/samba3
make
make install clean

I strongly encourage you to get a cup of coffee at this point. Or possibly take a nice, long nap. My installation took several hours. This is because it had to download the necessary components (including the ldap client) and compile everything. Of course, I was also rebuilding world at the same time (BSD aficionados will understand that reference) so I suppose it was my own fault.

Installation on Linux
For my CentOS installation of Samba, things were equally uncomplicated. CentOS, like many distros, uses the yum package manager. As root, I simply executed a search for the appropriate packages:

yum search samba

and got this result:

samba.i386 3.0.10-1.4E.9 base
Matched from:
samba
The Samba SMB server.
Samba is the protocol by which a lot of PC...

Yep, that's the one I'm looking for. Like ports, yum takes care of all the dependencies and so forth, so a simple...

yum install samba

...takes care of everything. Samba is now installed.

Purists will insist that Samba should be installed from source, and I suspect they are right. In fact, with very few exceptions, I usually install everything from source so I can fine tune it for my own needs. If you feel that this is the route for you with respect to Samba, then details for the various configurations options for doing so are available at http://www.samba.org.

Next time I'll get to the specifics of configuring smb.conf and adding users.