[FreeBSD]The net/samba35 port has been deleted: Obsoleted by net/samba36

FreeBSD is designed for users who got lots of spare time. Every once a while, it will give you some troubles (or “snacks” in programmer language), which help you to burn some of your spare time. If you cannot handle these troubles, then FreeBSD is not for you.

Although FreeBSD is a rock solid operating system, it is not smart enough to tell whether the owners (i.e., you and me) got plenty of spare time or not. Anyway, comparing to Windows Server, I think FreeBSD is considered an honor student already.

Okay, let’s go back to the error message. When I tried to update FreeBSD, I got the following error message:

Building new INDEX files... done.
===>>> Starting check of installed ports for available updates

===>>> The net/samba35 port has been deleted: Obsoleted by net/samba36
===>>> Aborting update

Terminated

Again, this is an old-school error. The port-maintainer decided that the samba35 is too old, and he likes to replace it by samaba36. We all love the new stuffs, but we want the transition goes smooth too. Apparently, it seems that the port-maintainer totally forgot about it.

If you check the directory, you will notice that /usr/ports/net/samba35 is deleted. If you try to soft-link samba36 to samba35, portmaster will likely to complain. The only way to solve this problem is by removing samba35 first, and installing samaba36 afterward.

So here is how to solve this problem:

sudo pkg_info | grep samba35

You will see something like the following:

samba35-3.5.19      A free SMB and CIFS client and server for UNIX

Let’s delete it.

sudo pkg_delete -f samba35-3.5.19

FreeBSD may remind you to manually remove Samba’s configuration, DO NOT do it.

WARNING: If you will *NOT* use this package anymore, please remove the
  following directories manually:
  /usr/local/etc/samba
  /var/log/samba
  /var/db/samba

Verify that the package has been deleted. The package should be gone.

sudo pkg_info | grep samba35

Now try to install the package again:

cd /usr/ports/net/samba36
sudo make install clean

After the installation is completed, don’t forget to start the Samba server:

sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/samba start

That’s it!

–Derrick

Our sponsors:

[FreeBSD] Samba does not start after updating to 3.5.14

After I updated my Samba to 3.5.14 on my FreeBSD box today, it stopped working. I couldn’t connect to the Samba server from my Windows clients. Initially, I thought it was the memory cache issues, and I thought the problem would be solved by rebooting both machines. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Therefore, I accessed to the server and check the cause of the problem.

First, I found that Samba was not evening running.

ps -ax | grep smb

So I started the Samba service manually:

sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/samba start

And it returned me the following message:

Cannot 'start' samba. Set winbindd_enable to YES in /etc/rc.conf or use 'onestart' instead of 'start'.

Oh that was easy. All I need to do was to modify my rc.conf:

#Samba service
samba_enable="YES"
winbindd_enable="YES"

And then I started the Samba again:

sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/samba start

Yay, Samba is up and running again!

–Derrick

Our sponsors:

Softlink / Symbolic Link doesn’t work on Samba – Solved

After upgrading my Samba servers (One is Ubuntu Linux, and the other one on Fedora Linux), I found that I can no longer access the symbolic links / soft links from Windows. It keeps returning “permission error”, “You don’t have permission to access this folder” etc. I am pretty sure that it has nothing to do with my user permission settings because it was working just fine before the upgrade. After trying several solutions, here is what I come up:

Edit your samba configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Add the following into the global section, i.e.,

[global]
...
follow symlinks = yes
wide links = yes
unix extensions = no
...

Save your file and restart Samba:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

It should work now.

Our sponsors:

“mount_smbfs: kldload(smbfs): Operation not permitted” SOLVED!!!!

When I tried to mount a windows share from FreeBSD:

sudo mount_smbfs -I WindowsBoxIPaddress //username@WindowsBoxIPaddress/WindowsShare /mnt

I always got this error:

mount_smbfs: kldload(smbfs): Operation not permitted

After searching this error message on Google, I found that all suggested solutions were related to running this command using sudo, which I already did. Today morning, I tried a different way and the problem is solved!

In /etc/rc.conf, I disable the following configurations:

#kern_securelevel="1"
#kern_securelevel_enable="YES"

After I rebooted the machine, and mounted the Windows share again, it worked! That’s simple, isn’t it?

Note: These two lines are for making the FreeBSD box more secure, and I highly recommend to put these in a public accessible server. I don’t think it is safe to make a public accessible server to access to any Windows box because there are not many protections you can do on a Windows box. In case the public server got hacked, the connections to other internal servers should be blocked, i.e., other internal servers can always access the public server, but not vice versa.

–Derrick

Our sponsors: