2 - Raspberry PI Community Projects

11.5.1. Samba Server
The samba package contains the main two servers of Samba 3, smbd and nmbd.
TOOL
Administrating Samba with
SWAT
SWAT (Samba Web Administration Tool) is a web interface that allows configuring
the Samba service. Since the swat package does not enable its configuration
interface by default, it must be enabled manually with update-inetd
--enable swat.
SWAT then becomes available at the hp://localhost:901 URL. Accessing it
means using the root account (and its usual password). Note that SWAT
rewrites the smb.conf in its own idiom, so it makes sense to make a backup
copy beforehand if you're only interested in testing this tool.
SWAT is very user-friendly; its interface includes an assistant that allows
defining the server's role in three questions. All global options can still be configured,
as well as those for all the existing shares, and of course new shares
can be added. Each option comes with a link to the relevant documentation.
DOCUMENTATION
Going further
The Samba server is extremely configurable and versatile, and can address
a great many different use cases matching very different requirements and
network architectures. This book only focuses on the use case where Samba
is used as main domain controller, but it can also be a simple server on the
domain and delegate authentication to the main controller (which could be a
Windows server).
The documentation available in the samba-doc package is very well wrien. In
particular, the Samba 3 By Example document (available as /usr/share/doc/
samba-doc/htmldocs/Samba3-ByExample/index.html) deals with a concrete
use case that evolves alongside the growing company.
TOOL
Authenticating with a
Windows Server
Winbind gives system administrators the option of using a Windows NT server
as an authentication server. Winbind also integrates cleanly with PAM and
NSS. This allows seing up Linux machines where all users of an NT domain
automatically get an account.
More information can be found in the /usr/share/doc/samba-doc/htmldocs/
Samba3-HOWTO/winbind.html file.
11.5.1.1. Configuring with debconf
The package sets up a minimal configuration based on the answers to a few Debconf questions
asked during the initial installation; this configuration step can be replayed later with dpkgreconfigure
samba-common samba.
The first piece of required information is the name of the workgroup where the Samba server
will belong (the answer is FALCOTNET in our case). Another question asks whether passwords
should be encrypted. The answer is that they should, because it's a requirement for the most
recent Windows clients; besides, this increases security. The counterpart is that this required
managing Samba passwords separately from the Unix passwords.
280 The Debian Administrator's Handbook