xinetd

[NedSlider]

OK, this one really caught me out... xinetd wasn't installed by default - I only noticed when trying to install VMware Server on CentOS 5 that uses xinetd. Simple enough to install via yum, but just thought I'd post in case it catches anyone else out too.

So why isn't it installed by default?

[Lenard]

Depending on your choices during installation all kinds of things :-? But like you state this is not that big of an issue sine using 'yum install foo' fixes the issue. I will tell you that the samba packages are a bit lacking, no /usr/bin/smbmnt, smbmount and smbumont for example. While this in many many cases is not a bing deal it can cause an issue or two, just a heads up.

[NedSlider]

Yep - the xinetd issue was easy enough to solve once I figured out it was missing :-)

Thanks Lenard - is that why I could no longer mount my Windows share at boot using smbfs from /etc/fstab? I got an error that smbfs was no longer supported and sort of got it working using cifs instead. No idea if that was the correct solution or not!

When I installed this particular box, I selected gnome and kde desktop options, plus development packages. I also manually added stuff like samba during the install but didn't select the full server group of packages. Samba (server and client) is set up and appears to be running fine.

[Lenard]

Well I do deal with some customers still using Windows98 and me (yea i know) the missing smb stuff was an issue. I fixed that by building my own custom samba rpm packages using the samba-3.0.24 source from samba.org

$ rpm -qa --qf="%{n}-%{v}-%{r}.%{arch}.rpm\n" 'samba*' | sort
samba-3.0.24-5.el5.x86_64.rpm
samba-client-3.0.24-5.el5.x86_64.rpm
samba-common-3.0.24-5.el5.i386.rpm
samba-common-3.0.24-5.el5.x86_64.rpm
samba-swat-3.0.24-5.el5.x86_64.rpm

[NedSlider]

Well, if the smbfs is no longer supported, then I can understand why smbmnt etc are not present.

When I try and manually mount with smbfs, I get the following error:

[code]mount: unknown filesystem type 'smbfs'[/code]

Manually mounting using cifs works, as does mounting from /etc/fstab with cifs.

The cifs workaround works for me, but it was just another one of those silly little things that caught me out :-)

[toracat]

You might want to check out this wiki page:

http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/WindowsShares

Akemi

[Lenard]

Seen ithat and use cifs for Windows 2000 and other cifs compatible operating systems. Like I said cifs does not work with older Windows 95/98/Me/NT systems so smbfs is still needed in these rare cases. Yes some are still around and in use (do not ask me why).

[NedSlider]

[quote]
Lenard wrote:
Seen ithat and use cifs for Windows 2000 and other cifs compatible operating systems. Like I said cifs does not work with older Windows 95/98/Me/NT systems so smbfs is still needed in these rare cases. Yes some are still around and in use (do not ask me why).[/quote]

Ah - I see. I didn't realise cifs wasn't compatible with Win98/NT etc... and yes, I know some folks still using NT4 servers too :-D

A related question - how does Vista and it's new SMB v2 protocol fit into the Linux mix? Any problems with older Samba in CentOS 4 or with cifs in CentOS 5? I've not had a chance to play much with Vista yet but I'm wondering how well it will slot in on a mixed network.

[Lenard]

I'm not sure about RHEL/CentOS 4 but RHEL/CentOS 5 works fairly well. Vista takes a little tweaking for Linux cifs support.
Nothing really hard, google has some helpful links to assist;

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4434907782.html
http://www.builderau.com.au/blogs/codemonkeybusiness/viewblogpost.htm?p=339270746

One really wants/needs at least samba 3.0.22 or better in any case.

[NedSlider]

Thanks for the links - interesting reads :-)

So at least CentOS5 should have no issues, and for CentOS4 the workaround looks simple enough if they don't fancy upgrading the base distro route. Maybe RH will backport this feature into Samba on RHEL4, although I doubt it.