Using Samba, Second Edition

Configuring Samba

Samba automatically configures itself prior to compilation. This reduces the likelihood of a machine-specific problem, but you might end up wishing for an option after Samba has been installed.

The source distribution of Samba 2.2 and above doesn’t initially have a makefile. Instead, one is generated through a GNU configure script, which is located in the samba-2.2.x /source/ directory. The configure script takes care of the machine-specific issues of building Samba.

Note

Before running the configure script, it is important that you become the root user on the system. Otherwise, you might get a warning such as:

configure: warning: running as non-root will disable some tests

You don’t want any test to be disabled when the Samba makefile is being created; it would leave the potential for errors down the road when compiling or running Samba on your system.

When the configure script is run, it prints out messages telling what it is doing, and error messages might be mixed in. To make sure you see those very important error messages, we suggest you run configure with its standard output passed through some filter to capture the output and keep it from scrolling out of sight. One method is using the more command:

# ./configure | more

We will show you another in a moment.

Although you can run configure as previously with no options, you might want to add support for extra features by passing options on the command line. For example:

# ./configure --with-winbind

will configure ...