Using Samba, Second Edition

Chapter 12. Troubleshooting Samba

Samba is extremely robust. Once you have everything set up the way you want, you’ll probably forget that it is running. When trouble occurs, it’s typically during installation or when you’re trying to reconfigure the server. Fortunately, a wide variety of resources are available to diagnose these troubles. While we can’t describe in detail the solution to every problem you might encounter, you should be able to get a good start at resolving the problem by following the advice given in this chapter.

The first section of this chapter lists the tool bag, a collection of tools available for troubleshooting Samba; the second section is a detailed how-to; the last section lists extra resources to track down particularly stubborn problems.

The Tool Box

Sometimes Unix seems to be made up of a grab bag of applications and tools. There are tools to troubleshoot tools. And of course, there are several ways to accomplish the same task. When trying to solve a problem related to Samba, a good plan of attack is to use the following:

• Samba logs

• Samba test utilities

• Unix utilities

• Fault tree

• Documentation and FAQs

• Samba newsgroups

• Searchable mailing list archives

Let’s go over each of these one-by-one in the following sections.

Samba Logs

Your first line of attack should always be to check the log files. The Samba log files can help diagnose the vast majority of the problems faced by beginning- to intermediate-level Samba administrators. Samba is quite flexible when it ...