Using Samba

Chapter 9. Troubleshooting Samba

Samba is extremely robust. Once you’ve got 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 add something new to the server. Fortunately, there are a wide variety of resources that you can use to diagnose these troubles. While we can’t describe in detail the solution to every problem that you might encounter, you should be able to get a good start at a resolution by following the advice given in this chapter.

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

The Tool Bag

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

1. Samba logs

2. Fault tree

3. Unix utilities

4. Samba test utilities

5. Documentation and FAQs

6. Searchable archives

7. Samba newsgroups

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 that beginning to intermediate Samba administrators are likely to face. ...