Linux Networking Cookbook

11.3. Starting and Stopping Samba

Problem

You want to know how to make Samba start automatically at boot, and you need to know the commands for manually starting, stopping, and restarting Samba.

Solution

Samba has two daemons: smbd and nmbd. If you installed Samba from packages (RPM or deb), startup scripts will have been created for you in /etc/init.d. Debian starts it up automatically. On Fedora, you need to run chkconfig:

	# chkconfig --add samba

Manually stopping and starting Samba is done on Fedora systems with these commands:

	# /etc/init.d/smb {stop|start|restart|reload|condrestart}

On Debian, use these commands:

	# /etc/init.d/samba {stop|start|restart|reload|force-reload}

Check to see if it is running with this command:

	$ ps ax | grep mbd
	 5781 ?        Ss    0:00 /usr/sbin/nmbd -D
	 5783 ?        Ss    0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D

If you installed Samba from source code, you'll find init scripts for various distributions in the packaging directory in the source tarball.

Discussion

condrestart is a conditional restart; it only restarts Samba if it's already running.

reload rereads smb.conf rather than restarting the smbd and nmbd daemons.

Samba rereads smb.conf periodically, so it's not strictly necessary to restart or reload with every change.

See Also

• man 8 chkconfig

• man 8 update-rc.d

• Chapter 7, "Starting and Stopping Linux," in Linux Cookbook, by Carla Schroder (O'Reilly) for recipes on managing runlevels and controlling services