Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: Does anyone actually use -smb

[Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>]

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 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?

Thanks,
-- Jamie