[CentOS] Upgrading samba past the regular packages

[Raymond Lillard]

Matt Hyclak wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 26, 2006 at 10:19:44PM -0500, Matt Morgan enlightened us:
>> Despite Craig's excellent help with my Excel/Samba, I continue to have
>> trouble with Samba 3.0.10 under CentOS 4.2. Quickbooks, now, too, is
>> just acting really weird.
>>
>> I'm tempted to upgrade beyond the regular packages, although I really
>> don't like to do that, because the samba list and a lot of info online
>> lead me to believe that 3.0.11+ fixes these issues.
>>
>> What's the best way to use something newer than the regualr packages?
>> Does someone out there have a CentOS repo with a newer samba? Should I
>> just use the Fedora packages?
>>
> 
> I've never used packages from here, but you might check out
> http://enterprisesamba.com/

My preference is to stay very close, but not too close
the the latest release.  To know this, I find it best to
subscribe to the samba mail-list at "samba.org".

For example. I waited a week before installing the latest
release of v3.0.21.  That wasn't long enough.  The next
day they released a patched version of v3.0.21 knows as
v3.0.21a.  From reading the mail-list, I know they are
expected to release v3.0.21b tomorrow.  Sure enough, my
user's suffered from a *feature* of the initial v3.0.21.
I should have waited another week.

I always build from the tarball.  Things get a bit tricky,
but you need to be careful when you run "./configure".
for starters, I go to the ".../package/RedHat" directory
and get the RPM "spec" file.  Search through it and find
the configure script used to build the Samba.Org version
of the RPM package file.  They are different from the
RedHat (CentOS) RPMs so don't mix things up here.

If you have already installed the CentOS supported Samba
package, you can uninstall it, or leave it in place and
build Samba from the tarball in such a manner as to not
collide with the CentOS installation.

I always put in under "/usr/local" and embed the version
number in the installed paths.  I then use symlinks to
make a standard installed tree homed on "/usr/local"
rather than "/usr".

After installation, you will probably need to fix-up the
libraries by adding a path to "/etc/ld.so.conf" so your
new libraries are found.  "ldconfig" is your friend.
You will also need to choose a method of insuring that
the file "/etc/init.d/smb" starts the new binaries.  My
choice is to pull the latest from the ".../package/RedHat"
directory. and adding something like

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH

near the top of the file and before anything important
happens.

I have written this missive as a stream of consciousness
kind of thing so I may have omitted important steps or
made grave errors. Y'all be careful hear.

I prefer this method because RedHat is very slow to pump
out updates and I Samba is too critical to the mission to
tolerate the wait for a fixes and feature enhancements to
come around.  CentOS being derived from RHEL, insures that
the delays are even longer.

Regards,
Ray