Help samba wont start - file server down!

[Red Squirrel]

I did a yum update on my FC9 server and I could have sworn I tested everything but I must of missed the most important: the file server.

I do "service smb start" and all I get is

Starting SMB services:

That's it. It does not start. I already tried rebooting, no go. Weirdly, I noticed my SMTP server was down too but I started it back up. I hope this does not screw up my PC link to the domain controller. I had that happen once and had to rejoin to the domain, which is a real PITA as I need to redo my profile.

There's no logs anywhere. Samba does not exactly have the best logging system.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Upon further investigation it looks like the issue is that I lost total contact with the domain. It no longer authenticates any machines. I really don't want to rejoin all the machines to the domain. That's just too many profiles to recreate and way too much work. My main machine being the worse. I worked hard on organizing my start menu, etc... really don't want to have to do all that again. :/

I think this exact issue happened last time I did an upgrade. It seems to clear the PC machine accounts or something. Is there some kind of way I can roll back only that one upgrade?

I should probably just use Windows as a DC. Samba is very unstable for that unfortunately. It's too bad.

Ok this is really bad. Looks like all the users got deleted. Where are these stored? I thought it was /etc/samba/smbusers but that file only has like 2 users, and even in my backups it only has 2 users. I was unable to readd a machine and then had to do smb -a root and readd root... this is really not good.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Fixed, sorta...

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=553904

Apparently they did a unilateral move and changed a setting which broke the SAM database. I edited the setting to use "passdb backend = smbpasswd" and it fixed my issue.

Only danger is now one of my machines still wont log in. I can access all my shares on my currently logged in machine but I'm scared that if I log out I loose contact with the domain controller and cannot log back in anymore. So I can't log out of this machine ever until I figure out how to get the machine accounts working.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Ended up having to just suck it up and do a domain remove/rejoin. Managed to salvage my old profile with only a few minor issues. Back in the game now.

I really wish samba would make it's domain controller capabilities better though. It has good potential for being an "AD killer" if they make it more solid and have more features, and perhaps even a AD GUI of some sort to completely get away from MS.

 

[Nothinman]

I really wish samba would make it's domain controller capabilities better though. It has good potential for being an "AD killer" if they make it more solid and have more features, and perhaps even a AD GUI of some sort to completely get away from MS.

The DC code is completely reverse engineered and only does NT4 domain emulation which means it's not even an AD competitor let alone a killer. Samba 4 is working on AD support but I have no idea how far along they are with it.

And there are already docs out there for setting up LDAP and Kerberos on Linux and joining Windows machines to the directory.