Hi all,

I've just posted a new new "how to" for setting up Samba on OS4, it is available here in the tutorials section. I found that the Samba Idiots Guide was missing a few things and I've tried to be much more comprehensive including how to set up User level security and not just Share.

I know that many people have had problems setting up Samba in the past (or just gave up), so I hope that this step by step guide will help someone!

Comments are welcome.

Happy Samba-ing.

Cheers!

@Reaps

Fantastic, I'll give it a go.

ace

@Reaps

Great! I was just going to sit down and try to find out why my Samba, which worked on Pre 4, is not working on Final.

_________________
Moxee
AmigaOne X1000
AmigaOne XE G4
I'd agree with you, but then we'd both be wrong.

@Moxee and acfnq

How'd you go?

I probably should have also said that most of what is in the guide is applicable to the versions of Samba for the classic Amiga - the only bits not being applicable is editing of the Roadshow TCP/IP stack files and that should translate fairly directly to the classic Amiga TCP/IP stacks (Miami, AmiTCP etc).

Cheers!

@Reaps

Thanks for the wonderful tutorial. Can Samba do dhcp on the AmigaOne and the final update? My AmigaOne, actually both of them, one in a home office and one in my College office, is on a dhcp network. I would like to keep that configuration. A quick glance through your very well done tutorial did not disclose a dhcp option.

Thanks again for the excellent information. I look forward to using it.

@lkeller

Quote:

Can Samba do dhcp on the AmigaOne and the final update?

I don't quite understand what you are asking. Can Samba run using a DHCP assigned address? Yes, that shouldn't be a problem - there is a comment in the sample smb.conf around the "interfaces" parameter which basically says "don't use this parameter if you are not using a static address" (interfaces is commented out in the sample). Can Samba issue DHCP addresses? No, well, not this release anyway.

@Reaps

Quote:

Reaps wrote: @lkeller Quote: Can Samba do dhcp on the AmigaOne and the final update? I don't quite understand what you are asking. Can Samba run using a DHCP assigned address? Yes, that shouldn't be a problem

I beg to differ. Samba + DHCP is a touchy issue. Some of the inner workings of the SMB protocol, as used by Samba, require that a host's IP address stays the same across the periodic service announcements the servers make.

If the IP address changes, inconsistencies within the databases, which SMB clients may build for the purpose of caching, can creep in. An example for such an inconsistency is a client showing the same host twice in a list, and while both entries seem to be identical, only one of them will work. Such glitches can persist for a very long time. For example, a small configuration mistake, which was quickly corrected, caused a host entry to show up twice for a Samba server I had configured. I configured that Server in June 2005, but the duplicate, incorrect server entry still shows up today.

DHCP can cause the IP address of a host to change over time, although the protocol aims to keep the IP address constant during the entire DHCP uptime. Samba, as I wrote, can cope only very poorly with such changes.

You should be relatively safe if DHCP assigns your computer an IP address only once, and subsequently succeeds in reacquiring it.

@olsen

I stand corrected. DHCP allocated address changes would be a problem for an Amiga running 2.2.5 - too much time in the linux world for me. Most recent distributions (running Samba 3+) mitigate such issues with hook scripts that are executed when the interface is brought up, down or IP changed. Would it be possible to do such a thing with the A1 and Roadshow? That is, have the Roadshow DHCP client be able to perform an action or raise some sort of event?

Back to the A1 running 2.2.5 - the likelihood of an IP change should be reduced if the machine is rarely off the network (i.e. always on); it is unlikely that a DCHP server would switch addresses on a host without reason while it is up, but not impossible... at least in my experience.

If the address changed between instances of Samba running on a host and there is some caching issue with the name, you should still be able to access the server by using its IP address (e.g. \\192.168.1.7\TheShare). Problem would be, of course knowing what the IP address is (or has changed to).

The bottom line would be that if your host is using a dynamic address, be prepared for some grief - you're likely to be at the mercy of the DHCP server implementation. If your host is truely to be used as a server, then a static address is a good idea. Many DCHP servers can be configured to allocate a fixed address to certain MAC addresses (I use that here) although most house-hold devices that I've seen can't do this but you can allways pick a static address outside of the DHCP allocation range.

Cheers!

Edit: "Most distributions" means a "recent distribution running Samba 3+".
Edit 2: Edit 1 failed to make sense... even to me!

Last edited by Reaps on 14-Jan-2007 at 11:47 AM.
Last edited by Reaps on 14-Jan-2007 at 11:45 AM.

@Reaps

Quote:

Reaps wrote: @Moxee and acfnq How'd you go?

Not very well for me. Went to bed last night frustrated. Woke up this morning all fresh and ready, but after many hours no joy. I've given up until next weekend.

A1 can ping XP, but XP cannot ping A1. XP also informs me that I am not authorized to access the A1. WHAT!?

It all worked before Final. There must be something I've changed by accident.

_________________
Moxee
AmigaOne X1000
AmigaOne XE G4
I'd agree with you, but then we'd both be wrong.

@Moxee

Quote:

A1 can ping XP, but XP cannot ping A1.

That doens't sound good at all... you haven't implemented some packet filtering (i.e. firewall) on the A1 have you? I presume by "ping" you mean opening a command prompt and typing "ping " and get "No reply from host"?

Can XP actually see the A1 in its list of "Microsoft Windows Network" (or whatever its called these days) hosts?

You would get the "not authorized" error if you have turned on User level security but not created the appropriate accounts with smbpasswd.

What is the IP and Windows Workgroup/Domain used in XP and what is the IP and Workgroup/Domain used on the A1?

Edit: Packet Filtering = Firewall

Last edited by Reaps on 15-Jan-2007 at 05:03 AM.

@Reaps

Quote:

Reaps wrote: @olsen I stand corrected. DHCP allocated address changes would be a problem for an Amiga running 2.2.5 - too much time in the linux world for me. Most recent distributions (running Samba 3+) mitigate such issues with hook scripts that are executed when the interface is brought up, down or IP changed. Would it be possible to do such a thing with the A1 and Roadshow? That is, have the Roadshow DHCP client be able to perform an action or raise some sort of event?

It is possible to be notified of interface configuration changes through the Roadshow extensions to the AmiTCP API, but that doesn't go so far as making hook scripts work from within the DHCP client. The thought never occured to me :-/ The script idea, just like writing special code for the Roadshow API, also wouldn't work for anything but Roadshow, so if you are still using Miami or AmiTCP in some form, you'd still have a problem (and for AmiTCP there's the additional problem of finding a robust DHCP client).

I'm wondering how portable the hook script feature is among different Unix implementations. They don't all work the same way, and not everybody even uses the same DHCP client software. On the Amiga we have our own issues with the Samba ports. Which reminds me that I probably ought to rebuild them. The clib2 runtime library has changed greatly since the last time I did...

Quote:

Back to the A1 running 2.2.5 - the likelihood of an IP change should be reduced if the machine is rarely off the network (i.e. always on); it is unlikely that a DCHP server would switch addresses on a host without reason while it is up, but not impossible... at least in my experience.

Yes, it is rare, and it's rare because one of DHCP's design goals is to keep the same IP addresses bound to the same clients over time. It's not impossible, but the unlikelihood of a change almost makes this a non-issue. But as with all such rarely occuring events, it's difficult to prepare for them to happen. These days most applications don't expect the host's IP address to change.

@Reaps

This is great! Thank you.

I'm just wondering of I want to only use the client, how far with the instructions shall I go?

Thanks,
Firbodi

_________________
MicroA1 G3, 512MB RAM, DVD-RW; and A1-SE G3,512MB RAM, CD-RW & DVD-ROM
Avatar: Perspolis, Capital of Achaemenid Empire 500 B.C.

@Moxee
You might want to try using only smbfs, which would allow you to mount a share from your file server or Windows boxes on your A1, but not the other way around. I love Samba, and have been deploying it as long as 10 or so years ago at places I've worked, but it may really be overkill here- OS4 really isn't meant to be a server OS...just another option, although certainly not to detract from Olsen's porting of it..I'm very glad it's there as an option

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@lkeller

For your home office at least, you should be able to configure your DHCP server always to assign the same address to each computer. I have my home network set up this way. Your office network may not be configurable in this way by you, but if it is, this should work the same way there also.

Hope this helps!

Stuart

@firbodi

If you only want to use the client part of it, then you don't really need the whole Samba archive per se. As Wegster pointed out, you should have a look at SMBFS which is pretty much an Amigaized smbclient (it allows you to mount a remote share as a volume or device. If you don't want to use SMBFS and really do just want to use the smbclient, then you only need the binaries installed, no configuration. At one point in the guide I show a test using smbclient... that is as far as you would need to go if you only wanted to use the client.

@Reaps

Thanks for your help. SMBFS sounds very easy to use. There's even an OS4 GUI for it on OS4Depot.

Firbodi

_________________
MicroA1 G3, 512MB RAM, DVD-RW; and A1-SE G3,512MB RAM, CD-RW & DVD-ROM
Avatar: Perspolis, Capital of Achaemenid Empire 500 B.C.

@wegster

Quote:

wegster wrote: @Moxee You might want to try using only smbfs, which would allow you to mount a share from your file server or Windows boxes on your A1, but not the other way around. I love Samba, and have been deploying it as long as 10 or so years ago at places I've worked, but it may really be overkill here- OS4 really isn't meant to be a server OS...

The existing Samba ports are not good matches for AmigaOS. While the ports work, the Samba server suite (at least up to and including version 3) is characterized by being monolithic and a resource hog. Both of which a Unix server operating system can cope with, but what a waste it is is visible more clearly on AmigaOS. Samba 4 may just change the picture, but it has not been adapted for AmigaOS yet.

If you choose to use the smbfs client, you should be prepared for strange performance fluctuations. Often uploads are slower than downloads, but there are other surprises in there, too, if the client talks to a Windows SMB server (things generally tend to be better with Samba at the other end of the connection).