Irritations with Samba

I've been drinking less coffee lately, and that might go a long way towards explaining why I had such trouble trying to configure Samba last night. This should have been a trivial exercise, but my forehead is sore from banging it against the wall so much.

As a side note, I need to get softer walls.

The installation of Samba on FreeBSD is trivial. Just type:

cd /usr/ports/net/samba
make install clean

Wait a bit, and suddenly you have samba installed. The startup scripts are, as usual, in:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d

and the configuration files are in:

/usr/local/etc/samba.

Nothing unusual there.

The next step is to modify the sample configuration file (smb.conf). I copied it (to save the original) and opened it up. Wow. There are a lot of options in there. I decided to try something simple at first, just to get it working. I had formatted the filesystem to leave a large (750 gig) partition mounted as /archive. That was where I planned to have rdiff-backup store everything. Why not make that mount as a Windows fileserver? That should be easy.

Using the existing smb.conf file as a starting point, I examined some of the sample entries. Here's the one I went with:

;[public]
; path = /usr/somewhere/else/public
; public = yes
; only guest = yes
; writable = yes
; printable = no

This seemed simple enough, so I changed it to this (removing the semicolons, which are comment markers):

[Archive]
path = /archive
public = yes
writable = yes

That looked easy enough. I made the change, entered some simple stuff at the top (server name, etc.) and started the process. Typing ps ax | grep smb showed that the process was running, so I fired up a Windows laptop, typed this in the address bar of a window:

\\trolius.local\Archive

(trolius.local being the name of the box I am working on, obviously). Lo and behold, the server mounted! Great. Well, that was easy. Just to be sure that things were working as expected, I opened the "My Network Places" icon on my desktop, and browsed the local network.

No server.

And it's still not there. And I can't figure out why. I think I'll purchase some coffee and try again. Caffeine solves so many problems...

Step one complete...

I took the time necessary to do a clean install of FreeBSD 6.1 on my dual processor Compaq last evening. It was, as is usually the case with FreeBSD, a very painless process.

The only thing that was a bit annoying was setting up the SMP part of the kernel. By default, FreeBSD does not use a kernel that supports multiple processors. Fortunately, this is a simple thing to do (although it did take quite a while to compile).

Tonight I hope to start experimenting with Samba, and see how much it's changed since I last gave it any consideration. I'll also install rdiff-backup, as (if things go well) I'll need it fairly soon anyway.

"The rumours of my death...."

In my previous post I had suggested that Tiny Sofa linux was in hibernation. Apparently this is not true, as anyone with enough initiative to visit their website can see. It was updated to tinysofa classic server 2.0 Update 6 (Ceara) just last month. To be fair, I was talking about the Enterprise version of this distro, which hasn't seen a significant update since February, 2005.

Mea culpa.

Picking an Operating System

Step one in getting my "this isn't going to cost me anything 'cause we'll just use open source and exising hardware" file server up and running is, of course, picking an appropriate operating system. I've always been somewhat agnostic in this area; I run a number of FreeBSD boxen, a couple of Macs, several Linux machines, and so forth. In the BSD world, I do have a decided preference for FreeBSD As for Linux, I used to use a distro called Tiny Sofa, but it appears to have gone into hibernation. Currently, I've been using CentOS, a repackaged version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, without the subscription fee. (I did visit distrowatch.com to see what was "cool" these days, but decided that it's turned into little more than a popularity contest).

The hardware I want to work with is an elderly Compaq, with dual Pentium III processors, tons of disk space and a gig of RAM. While this might seem museum-quality gear to to uninitiated, please bear in mind that we'll be running this without the Redmond tax, and without the (massive) overhead required by Windows. In fact, we won't run any windowing system at all; everything will be set up via the command line. If we want a GUI of some sort for administration, we'll find an open source web service that fits the bill, and run it from there.

Anyway, back to the process of choosing an operating system. A primary consideration, of course, is maintenance. I don't want to even think about this machine once it is up and running. Thus, updates should be painless. Well, CentOS has a pretty simple to use update manager (typing "yum update" and hitting the "y" a couple of times is pretty easy). But it's very hard to beat the ports system in FreeBSD.

After a bit of research into hardware compatibility, reliability, etc., I could not come up with a compelling reason to go with one operating system over the other. What it finally came down to was this: I found the FreeBSD install CD before I located my CentoOS disks.

FreeBSD it is!

Replacing a Windows Fileserver

We have been using an elderly Pentium II with an ancient install of Windows NT Server as our primary backup and file server for quite some time now. I was considering simply retiring the box, and replacing it with a newer machine with Windows Server 2003 (some variation thereof), when it occurred to me that reading about the open source alternative, Samba, has been on my to do list for quite some time.

Why make Microsoft any richer, when there is a free alternative out there?

This would also give me a chance to try out rdiff-backup, a rather nifty open source back up solution with point-in-time recovery (i.e. restore this file/directory/whatever to the condition it was last Tuesday at 11:23 AM). That would be very, very helpful in my line of work.

The Goal: use existing hardware and free software to create a fully functional Windows compatible file server and turf the elderly NT server solution. At the same time, design and implement a set-and-forget, point-in-time recovery capable backup strategy that will regularly poll live servers and our internal network and back everything up.

I'm going to start reading now. I'll keep you posted.