Using Samba, 3rd Edition

Chapter 12. Troubleshooting Samba

Samba is extremely robust. Once you have everything set up the way you want it, you’ll probably forget that it is running. When trouble occurs, it’s typically during installation or when you’re trying to reconfigure the server. Fortunately, a wide variety of resources are available to diagnose these troubles. Although we can’t describe in detail the solution to every problem you might encounter, you should be able to get a good start resolving the problem by following the advice given in this chapter.

The first section of this chapter lists what’s in the tool bag, a collection of utilities available for troubleshooting Samba; the second section is a detailed how-to; and the final section lists extra resources you can use to track down particularly stubborn problems.

This chapter doesn’t address problems specific to domain member servers. Due to the intimate relationship of joining a new server to a domain and troubleshooting this process, the information has been consolidated into a single chapter, Chapter 10. This chapter does provide the means to verify that basic network services are in order, which is a prerequisite to joining a Samba host to a domain.

The Tool Box

Sometimes Unix seems to be made up of a grab bag of applications and tools. There are tools to troubleshoot tools. And of course, there are several ways to accomplish the same task. When trying to solve a problem related to Samba, a good plan of attack is to use the following:

• Samba logs ...