Johnny -

Thanks for info! Fortunately I have a printout of smb.conf plus Samba working on another Centos server. My needs fall into that no man's land between the system oriented users and the newbie who bought his first computer. About once a year I need to put a new server online or make some tweaks. The rest of the time the server(s) just run while I forget everything I may have known (except for those things I wrote down).

It is curious that "system-config-samba" no longer works and smb.conf is correct (as well as Samba is working). "find / -name system-config-samba" does bring up several items, but I do not know enough to figure out what may be amiss.

Todd

Johnny Hughes wrote:

On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 12:56 -0800, Todd Cary wrote:

...

After making some adjustments to Samba via the Control Center, the System Settings | Server Settings | Samba (my preferred) no longer will display.

Can I fix this or do I need to reinstall Centos 4.4?

I've never used that thing (the file name is system-config-samba) as it can mangle the /etc/samba/smb.conf file .... I have never liked system- config-samba.

You shouldn't reinstall ... that program only works half the time anyway ... if it was not in the upstream distro and if we were not trying to mirror the upstream distro as closely as possible I would have taken it out already.

Your best bet is to learn how to edit that file (/etc/samba/smb.conf) by hand.

You can test the file for errors with this command (as root) from the command line:

testparm

If there is an error with the smb.conf file that should show it.

---

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On Sun, 2007-01-07 at 21:25 +0900, John Summerfield wrote:

Johnny Hughes wrote:

...

On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 12:56 -0800, Todd Cary wrote:

...

After making some adjustments to Samba via the Control Center, the System Settings | Server Settings | Samba (my preferred) no longer will display.

Can I fix this or do I need to reinstall Centos 4.4?

I've never used that thing (the file name is system-config-samba) as it can mangle the /etc/samba/smb.conf file .... I have never liked system- config-samba.

You shouldn't reinstall ... that program only works half the time anyway ... if it was not in the upstream distro and if we were not trying to mirror the upstream distro as closely as possible I would have taken it out already.

Your best bet is to learn how to edit that file (/etc/samba/smb.conf) by hand.

You can test the file for errors with this command (as root) from the command line:

I think Johnny's comments apply to several of the RH configuration tools. They're fairly basic and seem to me to be present just so that some beancounter can check a box, "Got that: [X]." I have over 20 system-config-* tools installed; only one (system-config-network) seems useful, and the TUI version of that's broken. The LVM and SELinux tools might be useful, I've never had their need.

John ... I tend to agree with you about most of those too ... the display one works (mostly), and the printer one is OK, and the network one too. But I would never, ever use the samba one, the httpd one, the securitylevel one, or the packages one. YMMV though :P

Les Mikesell wrote:

John Summerfield wrote:

...

...

Your best bet is to learn how to edit that file (/etc/samba/smb.conf) by hand.

You can test the file for errors with this command (as root) from the command line:

I think Johnny's comments apply to several of the RH configuration tools. They're fairly basic and seem to me to be present just so that some beancounter can check a box, "Got that: [X]." I have over 20 system-config-* tools installed; only one (system-config-network) seems useful, and the TUI version of that's broken. The LVM and SELinux tools might be useful, I've never had their need.

I think webmin is a better approach if you don't want to edit the files directly, but I haven't used that much either. What I'd really like to see is just a syntax checker for every config file and a scheme to automatically run it *before* killing the service that won't restart with the bad file. Webmin is only so-so at helping you make changes - you basically have to understand all the choices anyway, but it does keep you from making stupid typo's like you can in a text editor or things like putting #'s instead of ;'s as comments in a dns zone file.

I've used webmin too, but don't like it much.

The best I've seen for Linux doesn't apply to RH systesm; it's SUSE' YAST which installs and configures everything, and if you try to configure something that's not installed, it will offer to install it for you. It has some bugs, and I managed to injure my LDAP config with it, but it makes a decent effort at covering everything.

Probably the best I've seen is Apple's tools, Workstation Manager and User Manager I think they're called, for configuring its servers. One uses the same tools locally or remotely, including over a VPN. Against them is that they don't try to do everything - I don't recall anything to configure oss such as Apache (but LDAP is convered). On buying a book I found they're basically GUI wrappers for command-line tools, so I can sit at my CentOS VI box typing at Big Mac.

For Printers, _I_ use CUPS itself, the web interface is fairly usable & works from anywhere you can address the CUPS server, and again there are command-line tools to control stuff. The CUPS in RHEL5 even seems to have hardware autodetection.

Set CUPS to browse (I generally use vim for this if it's not already done) and it automatically finds all CUPS printers on the LAN, and I pointed one CUPS server at CUPS at work (via a VPN) and I could instantly print on printers at the office from all machines.

For SAMBA there's SWAT which, as it comes from samba.org, should be complete, but I use SAMBA so rarely I really coulnd't say. gvim's my usual gui here:-)