Using Samba

The Fault Tree

The fault tree is for diagnosing and fixing problems that occur when you’re installing and reconfiguring Samba. It’s an expanded form of a trouble and diagnostic document that is part of the Samba distribution.

Before you set out to troubleshoot any part of the Samba suite, you should know the following information:

• Your client IP address (we use 192.168.236.10)

• Your server IP address (we use 192.168.236.86)

• The netmask for your network (typically 255.255.255.0)

• Whether the machines are all on the same subnet (ours are)

For clarity, we’ve renamed the server in the following examples to server.example.com, and the client machine to client.example.com.

How to use the fault tree

Start the tests here, without skipping forward; it won’t take long (about five minutes) and may actually save you time backtracking. Whenever a test succeeds, you will be given a section name and page number to which you can safely skip.

Troubleshooting Low-level IP

The first series of tests is that of the low-level services that Samba needs in order to run. The tests in this section will verify that:

• The IP software works

• The Ethernet hardware works

• Basic name service is in place

Subsequent sections will add TCP software, the Samba daemons smbd and nmbd, host-based access control, authentication and per-user access control, file services, and browsing. The tests are described in considerable detail in order to make them understandable by both technically oriented end users and experienced systems ...