[Chapter 2] 2.5 Starting the Samba Daemons

2.5 Starting the Samba Daemons

There are two Samba processes, smbd and nmbd, that need to be running for Samba to work correctly. There are three ways to start:

By hand
As stand-alone daemons
From inetd

2.5.1 Starting the Daemons by Hand

If you're in a hurry, you can start the Samba daemons by hand. As root, simply enter the following commands:

# /usr/local/samba/bin/smbd -D
# /usr/local/samba/bin/nmbd -D

At this point, Samba will be running on your system and will be ready to accept connections.

2.5.2 Stand-alone Daemons

To run the Samba processes as stand-alone daemons, you need to add the commands listed in the previous section to your standard Unix startup scripts. This varies depending on whether you have a BSD-style Unix system or a System V Unix.

2.5.2.1 BSD Unix

WIth a BSD-style Unix, you need to append the following code to the rc.local file, which is typically found in the /etc or /etc/rc.d directories:

if [ -x /usr/local/samba/bin/smbd]; then
	echo "Starting smbd..."
	/usr/local/samba/bin/smbd -D
	echo "Starting nmbd..."
	/usr/local/samba/bin/nmbd -D
fi

This code is very simple; it checks to see if the smbd file has execute permissions on it, and if it does, it starts up each of the Samba daemons on system boot.

2.5.2.2 System V Unix

With System V, things can get a little more complex. System V typically uses scripts to start and stop daemons on the system. Hence, you need to instruct Samba how to operate when it starts and when it stops. You can modify the contents of the /etc/rc.local directory and add something similar to the following program entitled smb:

#!/bin/sh

# Contains the "killproc" function on Red Hat Linux
./etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

PATH="/usr/local/samba/bin:$PATH"

case $1 in 
	'start')
		echo "Starting smbd..."
		smbd -D
		echo "Starting nmbd..."
		nmbd -D
		;;
	'stop')
		echo "Stopping smbd and nmbd..."
		killproc smbd
		killproc nmbd
		rm -f /usr/local/samba/var/locks/smbd.pid
		rm -f /usr/local/samba/var/locks/nmbd.pid
		;;
	*)
		echo "usage: smb {start|stop}"
		;;
esac

With this script, you can start and stop the SMB service with the following commands:

# /etc/rc.local/smb start
Starting smbd...
Starting nmbd...
# /etc/rc.local/smb stop
Stopping smbd and nmbd...

2.5.3 Starting From Inetd

The inetd daemon is a Unix system's Internet "super daemon." It listens on TCP ports defined in /etc/services and executes the appropriate program for each port, which is defined in /etc/inetd.conf. The advantage of this scheme is that you can have a large number of daemons ready to answer queries, but they don't all have to be running. Instead, the inetd daemon listens in places of all the others. The penalty is a small overhead cost of creating a new daemon process, and the fact that you need to edit two files rather than one to set things up. This is handy if you have only one or two users or your machine has too many daemons already. It's also easier to perform an upgrade without disturbing an existing connection.

If you wish to start from inetd, first open /etc/services in your text editor. If you don't already have them defined, add the following two lines:

netbios-ssn     139/tcp
netbios-ns      137/udp

Next, edit /etc/inetd.conf. Look for the following two lines and add them if they don't exist. If you already have smbd and nmbd lines in the file, edit them to point at the new smbd and nmbd you've installed. Your brand of Unix may use a slightly different syntax in this file; use the existing entries and the inetd.conf manual page as a guide:

netbios-ssn stream tcp nowait root /usr/local/samba/bin/smbd smbd 
netbios-ns  dgram  udp wait   root /usr/local/samba/bin/nmbd nmbd

Finally, kill any smbd or nmbd processes and send the inetd process a hangup (HUP) signal. (The inetd daemon rereads its configuration file on a HUP signal.) To do this, use the ps command to find its process ID, then signal it with the following command:

# kill -HUP process_id

After that, Samba should be up and running.