[wplug] Xinetd and up2date

[James O'Kane]

On Wed, 14 May 2003, Arnaud wrote:

> I was looking at the bottom of this page
> http://hr.uoregon.edu/davidrl/samba/samba-install.html which is a link
> off of samba.org's documentation section. When you refer to running it
> "standalone" does that refer to running /usr/local/samba/bin/smbd -D and
> nmbd -D each time I want to run the server (or doing it with a script)?

Yes, that's what I mean by stand alone.

Standalone vs. (x)inetd:
When a process is refered to as 'standalone' it listens to a network port 
and handles connections entirely on its own. This is how apache is 
configured. It listens to port 80 all by itself.

Other services that only get run once in a blue moon, often use (x)inetd. 
xinetd listens on the network ports for the application in question. When 
a request comes in for a service, to launches the application in question. 
When the launched program has finished the request, it exits. If needed 
again xinetd will spawn a new instance. 

There is a trade off here. In the standalone model the process is always
running, it is using resources, such as memory, all the time, but you
don't have to wait for the program to be read from disk, and then
executed, etc.
In the xinetd model, the reverse is true. Memory is only used for the 
program when it's requested, but you have to wait for the startup.

(At the moment, I don't remember where tcp_wrappers fits in. If (x)inetd
handles that, then you get added security from that.)


Back to Samba. 
Samba  comes with Red Hat, unless this is learning experience for you, you 
might want to just install that version.

Some things that I can see go wrong with that config file. If you don't 
already have them, you should have these lines in /etc/services:
netbios-ns      137/tcp                         # NETBIOS Name Service
netbios-ns      137/udp
netbios-dgm     138/tcp                         # NETBIOS Datagram Service
netbios-dgm     138/udp
netbios-ssn     139/tcp                         # NETBIOS session service
netbios-ssn     139/udp

These are what tell xinetd what network ports to listen to for those 
services.

It might sound obvious, but make sure that the server line actually lists 
the right path to the file in question. (Occam told me to say that.)

If for some reason you changed the user and group lines, keep them as 
root.

If none of this helps, look at /var/log/messages, and I think 
/var/log/samba/*


-james