I recently upgraded two of my Solaris boxes to the latest Solaris 10 release and had some problems getting Samba working correctly again. Originally Samba on Solaris was started via the \/etc\/init.d\/samba script and depended on whether the \/etc\/sfw\/smb.conf configuration file existed. Then when the service framework came into use it was converted to a service, and you enabled it by running ‘svcadm enable samba’. All pretty straightforward so far.<\/p>\n
In current Solaris releases there is a subtle change that may not be immediately obvious. For most Samba configurations you have two daemon processes running, smbd and nmbd. smbd is what actually does the file serving. If you only have smbd running you can still access files but you need to manually enter the filesystem path to get there. nmbd provides the netbios\/wins service which is what announces on the LAN that the computer is part of a workgroup and what its name is. This is the piece that allows you to go to “My Network Places” or “View Workgroup Computers” and have stuff just automatically appear.<\/p>\n
The change in the current Solaris versions is that while both daemons were controlled together in the past, they are now controlled as separate services. So now if you just do ‘svcadm enable samba’ it turns on only smbd and you only get file sharing that you can manually access. If you go to “My Network Places” or “View Workgroup Computers” you won’t see anything from that server. To enable nmbd also you need to also run ‘svcadm enable wins’.<\/p>\n
Why would they do things this way? In more advanced network configurations you may have a domain controller that performs the netbios\/wins functions. In that environment, separately running nmbd on a standalone server could cause confusion. Others may not want to run it because they don’t want an intruder to be able to easily discover shared filesystems. In any case, for most simple LAN based file service implementations, such as a home or small office network, you would probably want to run both services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently upgraded two of my Solaris boxes to the latest Solaris 10 release and had some problems getting Samba working correctly again. Originally Samba on Solaris was started via the \/etc\/init.d\/samba script and depended on whether the \/etc\/sfw\/smb.conf configuration file existed. Then when the service framework came into use it was converted to a … Continue reading “Enabling Samba on recent Solaris releases”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}