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

On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 09:59 -0500, Matt Morgan wrote:

On 1/27/06, Greg Swallow - SkyNet gregswallow@skynetonline.ca wrote:

...

Matt Morgan wrote:

...

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.

Did you check bugzilla.redhat.com for a bug report similar to the problem you're having? If you don't find one you should report a bug there first, before looking for other solutions.

Yes, there's a bug there for the Excel issue. I haven't done a ton of testing to see if this other QuickBooks problem is the same thing, or if there's another separate bugzilla bug, but it does look like a well-known issue in 3.0.10, not specific to RH/CentOS. They appear to be bugs fixed in more recent Samba releases.

---- There doesn't seem to be much complaining about this on upstream bugzilla.

I definitely use samba at a number of clients and haven't run into this and one of my clients - they all use Office XP/2003 - I don't think they are heavy Excel users but I have used Excel 2003 in that office myself and not run into the issue. That particular client is using CentOS-4.2 on the samba server.

Many of my clients also run Quickbooks - even in multi-user mode off a samba share and other than complaints about speed, I haven't had any issues there either.

FWIW

Craig