[ale] preferred Samba admin tool

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 21:24 -0400, Björn Gustafsson wrote:
> I'm looking to install Samba at home for the first time in a while,
> and I'm wondering what's a good tool these days to manage a Samba 3
> server.  There are several options available in the Ubuntu repos, but
> none of them stand out at first glance.
> 
> Any recommendations? 

For the servers that I manage, I currently tackle the configuration by
hand.  For the most part, once it's set, it doesn't need modification
unless there is a problem.

One thing to keep in mind is that it's a configuration file that you
will rather infrequently modify, but it _is_ read quite frequently by
Samba.  So what I do is keep a commented version of the file with all my
explicit configuration in a single file, smb.conf.master, and then I use
the testparm tool to generate an efficient configuration file for smb to
parse.  You can do this by using the following command in the directory
where Samba expects to find its configuration:

 $ sudo testparm -s smb.conf.master > smb.conf

This will result in a much smaller, comment-free smb.conf where any
values that are set to their default values will also be absent.  You
can force testparm to output all implicit/default configuration with the
-v parameter, but you shouldn't need to do that; if you need a setting
to be set explicitly, just use testparm every time you upgrade Samba and
anything that is no longer the default will then be included in the
file.

	--- Mike