Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Jan Kiszka wrote:
>> Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>> It looks to be broken.  I don't recall that Samba has every supported
>>> running as an unprivileged user to so it would require launching as root.
>> It works perfectly. I even have a patch pending that fixes the zombie
>> issue it causes (more precisely, slirp missed that).
> 
> I've been unable to use it for a year or so due to Samba having
> hard-coded directory paths, pointing into /var/lib/samba, which cannot
> be overridden in the config file smb.conf.
> 
> (I forget which files were hard-coded, or which distro I hit that on.
> Either CentOS, Debian or Ubuntu.  Files were something like
> /var/lib/samba/{locking,connections}.tdb, perhaps?)
> 
> Because of those paths, non-root wasn't possible and running it as
> root caused it to try to clobber some files which interfered with a
> non-QEMU ("native") Samba running on the same machine for normal file
> service.

I ran strace -e open and only caught this:

[pid 28902] open("/var/log/samba/log.smbd", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_APPEND,
0644) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

But that would only be a problem if I ran qemu as root. Hmm, wait, I can
fix it by specifying the file like this:

log file=/tmp/qemu-smb.28902/log.%m

Will write a patch for qemu.

> 
> I guess if you have a private build of Samba you can avoid this
> problem, but even then I'm wondering how you ensure different Samba
> instances don't interfere with each other, as there is nowhere in
> smb.conf to specify an alternate location for those files normally in
> /var/lib/samba.
> 
> Jan, do you do anything special for -smb or does it just work?  What
> distro and distro version are you using?

OpenSUSE 11.0 with samba-3.2.4-4.3 and 11.1 with samba-3.2.7-11.2.1.

Maybe you should file a bug at your distro if its version doesn't behave
according to its docs.

Jan