The Samba suite is available at the samba website. It is not recommended that you run a version of Samba with the word "alpha" in its name unless you know what you are doing and are willing to do some debugging. Many, many people just get the latest recommended stable release version and are happy. If you are brave, by all means take the plunge and help with the testing and development - but don't install it on your departmental server. Samba is typically very stable and safe, and this is mostly due to the policy of many public releases. How the scheme works: When major changes are made the version number is increased. For example, the transition from 1.9.15 to 1.9.16. However, this version number will not appear immediately and people should continue to use 1.9.15 for production systems (see next point.) Just after major changes are made the software is considered unstable, and a series of alpha releases are distributed, for example 1.9.16alpha1. These are for testing by those who know what they are doing. The "alpha" in the filename will hopefully scare off those who are just looking for the latest version to install. When Andrew thinks that the alphas have stabilised to the point where he would recommend new users install it, he renames it to the same version number without the alpha, for example 1.9.16. Inevitably bugs are found in the "stable" releases and minor patch levels are released which give us the pXX series, for example 1.9.16p2. So the progression goes: 1.9.15p7 (production) 1.9.15p8 (production) 1.9.16alpha1 (test sites only) : 1.9.16alpha20 (test sites only) 1.9.16 (production) 1.9.16p1 (production) The above system means that whenever someone looks at the samba ftp site they will be able to grab the highest numbered release without an alpha in the name and be sure of getting the current recommended version. Many different platforms have run Samba successfully. The platforms most widely used and thus best tested are Linux and SunOS. At time of writing, there is support (or has been support for in earlier versions): A/UX 3.0 AIX Altos Series 386/1000 Amiga Apollo Domain/OS sr10.3 BSDI B.O.S. (Bull Operating System) Cray, Unicos 8.0 Convex DGUX. DNIX. FreeBSD HP-UX Intergraph. Linux with/without shadow passwords and quota LYNX 2.3.0 MachTen (a unix like system for Macintoshes) Motorola 88xxx/9xx range of machines NetBSD NEXTSTEP Release 2.X, 3.0 and greater (including OPENSTEP for Mach). OS/2 using EMX 0.9b OSF1 QNX 4.22 RiscIX. RISCOs 5.0B SEQUENT. SCO (including: 3.2v2, European dist., OpenServer 5) SGI. SMP_DC.OSx v1.1-94c079 on Pyramid S series SONY NEWS, NEWS-OS (4.2.x and 6.1.x) SUNOS 4 SUNOS 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4 (Solaris 2.2, 2.3, and '2.4 and later') Sunsoft ISC SVR3V4 SVR4 System V with some berkely extensions (Motorola 88k R32V3.2). ULTRIX. UNIXWARE UXP/DS Look at the samba mailing list page Those who have registered in the Samba survey as "Pizza Factory" will already know this, but the rest may need some help. Andrew doesn't ask for payment, but he does appreciate it when people give him pizza. This calls for a little organisation when the pizza donor is twenty thousand kilometres away, but it has been done. Method 1: Ring up your local branch of an international pizza chain and see if they honour their vouchers internationally. Pizza Hut do, which is how the entire Canberra Linux Users Group got to eat pizza one night, courtesy of someone in the US. Method 2: Ring up a local pizza shop in Canberra and quote a credit card number for a certain amount, and tell them that Andrew will be collecting it (don't forget to tell him.) One kind soul from Germany did this. Method 3: Purchase a pizza voucher from your local pizza shop that has no international affiliations and send it to Andrew. It is completely useless but he can hang it on the wall next to the one he already has from Germany :-) Method 4: Air freight him a pizza with your favourite regional flavours. It will probably get stuck in customs or torn apart by hungry sniffer dogs but it will have been a noble gesture. See Browsing.html in the docs directory of the samba source for more information on browsing. If your GUI client does not permit you to select non-browsable servers, you may need to do so on the command line. For example, under Lan Manager you might connect to the above service as disk drive M: thusly: net use M: \\mary\fred The details of how to do this and the specific syntax varies from client to client - check your client's documentation. If you check what files are not showing up, you will note that they are files which contain upper case letters or which are otherwise not DOS-compatible (ie, they are not legal DOS filenames for some reason). The Samba server can be configured either to ignore such files completely, or to present them to the client in "mangled" form. If you are not seeing the files at all, the Samba server has most likely been configured to ignore them. Consult the man page smb.conf(5) for details of how to change this - the parameter you need to set is "mangled names = yes". This indicates one of three things: You supplied an incorrect server name, the underlying TCP/IP layer is not working correctly, or the name you specified cannot be resolved. After carefully checking that the name you typed is the name you should have typed, try doing things like pinging a host or telnetting to somewhere on your network to see if TCP/IP is functioning OK. If it is, the problem is most likely name resolution. If your client has a facility to do so, hardcode a mapping between the hosts IP and the name you want to use. For example, with Lan Manager or Windows for Workgroups you would put a suitable entry in the file LMHOSTS. If this works, the problem is in the communication between your client and the netbios name server. If it does not work, then there is something fundamental wrong with your naming and the solution is beyond the scope of this document. If you do not have any server on your subnet supplying netbios name resolution, hardcoded mappings are your only option. If you DO have a netbios name server running (such as the Samba suite's nmbd program), the problem probably lies in the way it is set up. Refer to Section Two of this FAQ for more ideas. By the way, remember to REMOVE the hardcoded mapping before further tests :-) This message indicates that your client CAN locate the specified server, which is a good start, but that it cannot find a service of the name you gave. The first step is to check the exact name of the service you are trying to connect to (consult your system administrator). Assuming it exists and you specified it correctly (read your client's docs on how to specify a service name correctly), read on: Many clients cannot accept or use service names longer than eight characters. Many clients cannot accept or use service names containing spaces. Some servers (not Samba though) are case sensitive with service names. Some clients force service names into upper case. Make sure that the specified print command for the service you are connecting to is correct and that it has a fully-qualified path (eg., use "/usr/bin/lpr" rather than just "lpr"). Make sure that the spool directory specified for the service is writable by the user connected to the service. In particular the user "nobody" often has problems with printing, even if it worked with an earlier version of Samba. Try creating another guest user other than "nobody". Make sure that the user specified in the service is permitted to use the printer. Check the debug log produced by smbd. Search for the printer name and see if the log turns up any clues. Note that error messages to do with a service ipc$ are meaningless - they relate to the way the client attempts to retrieve status information when using the LANMAN1 protocol. If using WfWg then you need to set the default protocol to TCP/IP, not Netbeui. This is a WfWg bug. If using the Lanman1 protocol (the default) then try switching to coreplus. Also not that print status error messages don't mean printing won't work. The print status is received by a different mechanism. Your guest account is probably invalid for some reason. Samba uses the guest account for browsing in smbd. Check that your guest account is valid. See also 'guest account' in smb.conf man page. This can have several causes. It might be because you are using a uid or gid of 65535 or -1. This is a VERY bad idea, and is a big security hole. Check carefully in your /etc/passwd file and make sure that no user has uid 65535 or -1. Especially check the "nobody" user, as many broken systems are shipped with nobody setup with a uid of 65535. It might also mean that your OS has a trapdoor uid/gid system :-) This means that once a process changes effective uid from root to another user it can't go back to root. Unfortunately Samba relies on being able to change effective uid from root to non-root and back again to implement its security policy. If your OS has a trapdoor uid system this won't work, and several things in Samba may break. Less things will break if you use user or server level security instead of the default share level security, but you may still strike problems. The problems don't give rise to any security holes, so don't panic, but it does mean some of Samba's capabilities will be unavailable. In particular you will not be able to connect to the Samba server as two different uids at once. This may happen if you try to print as a "guest" while accessing a share as a normal user. It may also affect your ability to list the available shares as this is normally done as the guest user. Complain to your OS vendor and ask them to fix their system. Note: the reason why 65535 is a VERY bad choice of uid and gid is that it casts to -1 as a uid, and the setreuid() system call ignores (with no error) uid changes to -1. This means any daemon attempting to run as uid 65535 will actually run as root. This is not good! This is from Paul Eggert eggert@twinsun.com. Most likely it's a problem with your time zone settings. Internally, Samba maintains time in traditional Unix format, namely, the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 Universal Time (or ``GMT''), not counting leap seconds. On the server side, Samba uses the Unix TZ variable to convert internal timestamps to and from local time. So on the server side, there are two things to get right. The Unix system clock must have the correct Universal time. Use the shell command "sh -c 'TZ=UTC0 date'" to check this. The TZ environment variable must be set on the server before Samba is invoked. The details of this depend on the server OS, but typically you must edit a file whose name is /etc/TIMEZONE or /etc/default/init, or run the command `zic -l'. TZ must have the correct value. If possible, use geographical time zone settings (e.g. TZ='America/Los_Angeles' or perhaps TZ=':US/Pacific'). These are supported by most popular Unix OSes, are easier to get right, and are more accurate for historical timestamps. If your operating system has out-of-date tables, you should be able to update them from the public domain time zone tables at ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/. If your system does not support geographical timezone settings, you must use a Posix-style TZ strings, e.g. TZ='PST8PDT,M4.1.0/2,M10.5.0/2' for US Pacific time. Posix TZ strings can take the following form (with optional items in brackets): StdOffset[Dst[Offset],Date/Time,Date/Time] where: `Std' is the standard time designation (e.g. `PST'). `Offset' is the number of hours behind UTC (e.g. `8'). Prepend a `-' if you are ahead of UTC, and append `:30' if you are at a half-hour offset. Omit all the remaining items if you do not use daylight-saving time. `Dst' is the daylight-saving time designation (e.g. `PDT'). The optional second `Offset' is the number of hours that daylight-saving time is behind UTC. The default is 1 hour ahead of standard time. `Date/Time,Date/Time' specify when daylight-saving time starts and ends. The format for a date is `Mm.n.d', which specifies the dth day (0 is Sunday) of the nth week of the mth month, where week 5 means the last such day in the month. The format for a time is [h]h[:mm[:ss]], using a 24-hour clock. Other Posix string formats are allowed but you don't want to know about them. On the client side, you must make sure that your client's clock and time zone is also set appropriately. [[I don't know how to do this.]] Samba traditionally has had many problems dealing with time zones, due to the bizarre ways that Microsoft network protocols handle time zones. Question: On NT, I opened "Printer Manager" and "Connect to Printer". Enter ["\\ptdi270\ps1"] in the box of printer. I got the following error message You do not have sufficient access to your machine to connect to the selected printer, since a driver needs to be installed locally. Answer: In the more recent versions of Samba you can now set the "printer driver" in smb.conf. This tells the client what driver to use. For example: printer driver = HP LaserJet 4L With this, NT knows to use the right driver. You have to get this string exactly right. To find the exact string to use, you need to get to the dialog box in your client where you select which printer driver to install. The correct strings for all the different printers are shown in a listbox in that dialog box. MS Office Setup reports "Cannot change properties of '\MSOFFICE\SETUP.INI'" When installing MS Office on a Samba drive for which you have admin user permissions, ie. admin users = username, you will find the setup program unable to complete the installation. To get around this problem, do the installation without admin user permissions The problem is that MS Office Setup checks that a file is rdonly by trying to open it for writing. Admin users can always open a file for writing, as they run as root. You just have to install as a non-admin user and then use "chown -R" to fix the owner.