samba - Dec 2004 - Problem moving Samba shares to newly installed drive

Hello,

I have been working on a RedHat machine that is a PDC for a Windows network
running XP clients.

The system has the following shares defined in /etc/samba/smb.conf:

/home/netlogon
/home/profiles
/public (FYI /public is a symbolic link to /home/public)
/home/share1
/home/share2

They are all on the /home partition which is on the main system drive, which
is full.

I have installed a second drive, made an ext2 file system, and mounted the
drive as 1 large partition called /share.

I then copied all the data from the /home partition to the /share drive via
( cp -R /home/* /share ).

I then edited the paths for the shares listed above in /etc/samba/smb.conf,
changing any references to /home to /share.  I deleted the /public symbolic
link, and changed the share path for that share to /share/public

Restarting Samba resulted in the client machines (all running XP) logging in
and receiving an error that their profiles could not be found.

I quickly reverted everything back to the way it was to make sure all was
well, which it was.

I then tried just changing the location of the /public share, by changing
the path in smb.conf from /public to /share/public, expecting that the users
would be able to login, their home directories would be full, but the
'public' share would be on the new large drive at least.

But doing just this also resulted in them receiving the error that their
roaming profile could not be located.

I had also tried not mounting the /home partition on the primary drive, and
mounting the new drive ( /dev/sdb ) as /home expecting this would work and
would result in me not needing to edit anything in /etc/samba/smb.conf -
which was also wrong - I got the same results, profiles could not be found.

So I reverted everything back to the old drive, but created a new share in
smb.conf called 'new' and set its path to /share (the new drive) and
this
worked, it was happy to leave existing shares in the original location and
have a new share in the new location.

This at least gave the people a new spot to put their data, but was not what
they were after.



My questions are:

1)  The first thing I noticed is that when I copied everything over from the
old drive to the new, all the permissions, ownership & group information was
lost.  Everything was owned by root.  Manually changing the permissions for
the /share/profile folder to make them match the original made no
difference.  What did I do wrong ( cp -R /home/* /share ) that did not copy
the permissions / ownership info over?

2)  Why would changing the location of the 'public' share result in
people
not being able to login, when their profiles and the 'netlogon' share
were
still defined as being on the old drive?

3)  Searching for smb.conf resulted in several copies of it floating around
the place, most of them in folders that included 'example' in the path. 
Is
it possible that Samba could be looking at multiple copies of this?  Where
is Samba told which smb.conf to look at?

4)  If you can spot where I have errored, please point it out.  If I can
provide more info, please let me know, I've tried to be as precise as
possible.

Thanks in advance.

Daniel

cp -R will not preserve the permissions, cp -Rp will.

Daniel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have been working on a RedHat machine that is a PDC for a Windows network
> running XP clients.
> 
> The system has the following shares defined in /etc/samba/smb.conf:
> 
> /home/netlogon
> /home/profiles
> /public (FYI /public is a symbolic link to /home/public)
> /home/share1
> /home/share2
> 
> They are all on the /home partition which is on the main system drive,
which
> is full.
> 
> I have installed a second drive, made an ext2 file system, and mounted the
> drive as 1 large partition called /share.
> 
> I then copied all the data from the /home partition to the /share drive via
> ( cp -R /home/* /share ).
> 
> I then edited the paths for the shares listed above in /etc/samba/smb.conf,
> changing any references to /home to /share.  I deleted the /public symbolic
> link, and changed the share path for that share to /share/public
> 
> Restarting Samba resulted in the client machines (all running XP) logging
in
> and receiving an error that their profiles could not be found.
> 
> I quickly reverted everything back to the way it was to make sure all was
> well, which it was.
> 
> I then tried just changing the location of the /public share, by changing
> the path in smb.conf from /public to /share/public, expecting that the
users
> would be able to login, their home directories would be full, but the
> 'public' share would be on the new large drive at least.
> 
> But doing just this also resulted in them receiving the error that their
> roaming profile could not be located.
> 
> I had also tried not mounting the /home partition on the primary drive, and
> mounting the new drive ( /dev/sdb ) as /home expecting this would work and
> would result in me not needing to edit anything in /etc/samba/smb.conf -
> which was also wrong - I got the same results, profiles could not be found.
> 
> So I reverted everything back to the old drive, but created a new share in
> smb.conf called 'new' and set its path to /share (the new drive)
and this
> worked, it was happy to leave existing shares in the original location and
> have a new share in the new location.
> 
> This at least gave the people a new spot to put their data, but was not
what
> they were after.
> 
> 
> 
> My questions are:
> 
> 1)  The first thing I noticed is that when I copied everything over from
the
> old drive to the new, all the permissions, ownership & group
information was
> lost.  Everything was owned by root.  Manually changing the permissions for
> the /share/profile folder to make them match the original made no
> difference.  What did I do wrong ( cp -R /home/* /share ) that did not copy
> the permissions / ownership info over?
> 
> 2)  Why would changing the location of the 'public' share result in
people
> not being able to login, when their profiles and the 'netlogon'
share were
> still defined as being on the old drive?
> 
> 3)  Searching for smb.conf resulted in several copies of it floating around
> the place, most of them in folders that included 'example' in the
path.  Is
> it possible that Samba could be looking at multiple copies of this?  Where
> is Samba told which smb.conf to look at?
> 
> 4)  If you can spot where I have errored, please point it out.  If I can
> provide more info, please let me know, I've tried to be as precise as
> possible.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Daniel
> 
>

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Daniel wrote:
| Hello,
|
| I have been working on a RedHat machine that is a PDC for a Windows
network
| running XP clients.
|
| The system has the following shares defined in /etc/samba/smb.conf:
|
| /home/netlogon
| /home/profiles
| /public (FYI /public is a symbolic link to /home/public)
| /home/share1
| /home/share2
|
| They are all on the /home partition which is on the main system drive,
which
| is full.
|
| I have installed a second drive, made an ext2 file system, and mounted the
| drive as 1 large partition called /share.
|
| I then copied all the data from the /home partition to the /share
drive via
| ( cp -R /home/* /share ).

Couple of points.

1. It sounds like maybe you are combining profiles and home directories.
~ I remember hearing that this is a bad idea for security reasons. I'm
sorry, though.  I can't remember the specifics.

2. Use -pR on your copy.  Where p stands for preserve ownerships and
permissions. Alternatively, think about using mv instead. If I am not
mistaken, it doesn't mess with the perms.

As for the rest, it is hard to tell.  If you can get back to square 1
and start over, it would be best.  This would include removing the extra
smb.conf files to your root directory (i.e. someplace out of the way) at
least. As far as I know, samba has one and only one configuration file
although I think sub-configuration files *can* be specified within it.
Still I'm pretty sure that if you had done this, you would know.


Jim C.
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