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In this tutorial we show the example of how we can manage our samba server graphically with SWAT, the SAMBA Web Administration Tool. Not only can we manage samba with the GUI but it is consistent across distributions rather then using YaST on SUSE that is SUSE specific. We use Ubuntu to demonstrate this on as it requires a little more work tan other distributions as they do not automatically add in the xinetd config file.
To start we need to install SAMBA, SWAT and the XINETD which manages SWAT.
sudo apt-get install samba smbfs samba-doc xinetd swat
With the installation in place we can movie intot he /etc/xinted.d directory and create a configuration for SWAT. XINTED is a master service that can control and manage smaller services such as swat. We need to tell XINETD about the SWAT service and this is the purpose of the file we create /etc/xinetd.d/swat
service swat
{
disable = no
socket_type = stream
user = root
wait = no
port = 901
server = /usr/sbin/swat
log_on_failure += USERID
}
Once we have saved this we can restart the xinetd
service xinetd restart
If we check the output from netstat we should be able to see the service listening on port 901 and being held open by the xinetd
netstat -pant
We have to authenticate to SWAT to be able to manage the samba server. If we want to use members of the adm group not just root then we set the permissions accordingly on the /etc/samba/smb.conf
chgrp adm /etc/samba/smb.conf chmod g+w /etc/samba/smb.conf
I can now log onto SWAT as my account which is a member of the adm group in Ubuntu. I just need to point my browser to
http://192.168.0.150:901
Or at least that is the address of my server. From here we can easily create shares and view setting. As a member of the adm group and can manage the server but no samba users. Root can do that. Or I can use the command line
To list samba users I can use
sudo pdbedit -L
and to add new users
sudo smbpasswd -a andrew
Now I can connect to the shares I have created from my Windows client.