Using Samba, Second Edition

Enabling SWAT

The Samba Web Administration Tool (SWAT) runs as a daemon under inetd or xinetd and provides a forms-based editor in your web browser for creating and modifying Samba’s configuration file. For SWAT to work, entries must be added for it in the /etc/services and /etc/inetd.conf (or /etc/xinetd.d/swat) configuration files. To add the entries, follow these two steps:

1. Check your /etc/services file, and if it does not contain the following line, add it to the end of the file:

   swat   901/tcp

2. Now for inetd or xinetd. These are “Internet super daemons” that handle starting daemons on demand, instead of letting them sit around in memory consuming system resources. Most systems use inetd, but xinetd is also used in some versions of Unix, notably the Red Hat Linux (Versions 7 and newer) that we use in our examples. You can use the ps command to see which of the two your system is running.

For inetd, add a line to the /etc/ inetd.conf file. (Check your inetd.conf manual page to see the exact format of the inetd.conf file if it differs from the following example.) Don’t forget to change the path to the SWAT binary if you installed it in a different location from the default /usr/local/samba:

swat   stream  tcp  nowait  root  /usr/local/samba/bin/swat  swat

Then force inetd to reread its configuration file by sending it a SIGHUP (hangup) signal:

# /bin/kill -HUP -a inetd

Notice that we are using a version of the kill command that supports the -a option, so as to allow us to specify the process ...