Using Samba, 3rd Edition

Chapter 2. Installing Samba on a Unix System

It would be unwise to purchase a car or a house on appearance alone or from a description in a brochure. It is similarly unwise to talk about a piece of software without hands-on experience. Systems administration is a hands-on job. In this chapter, we are dedicated to helping you test drive your own server so that you can see for yourself how Samba behaves. Because open source projects (and software packages in general) evolve over time, the remainder of this book is based on the current production Samba release at the time of writing, version 3.0.22. We start with the necessary steps to install Samba both from the source release available on the official Samba web site and from vendor or community packages. By the end of the chapter, you will have a working server with a simple disk share.

Binary Packages

Samba is so popular with Unix/Linux administrators that many vendors include prepackaged versions in their operating system distributions. There are advantages to using software packages, one of which is that you do not have to bother with the details of compiling the software itself. The main drawback is that you are dependent on the options the vendor chose when building Samba. It is also likely that the server will be slightly behind the current production Samba release, because vendors tend to upgrade packages only when there is a strong reason, such as a widely experienced bug or security issue. On the other hand, you can be ...