Alex,
I tried running Samba on RHEL4 Update 2 (on VMWare) and ran into some
issues and I can provide you my opinion. Take care when making any
decisions. There are quite a few things to consider:
1) Is having support from Red Hat on Samba necessary?
2) Are you confident enough in yourself to go off the beaten path from
Red Hat?
3) Have you considered other vendors for support on Samba itself?
4) Would upper management (if any) hold you responsible for going off
the support path in the event of an issue?
5) Do you have an adequate test environment?
If you are going away from Red Hat support, #5 is critical. They test
and test and test (or at least should) packages prior to pushing them
out. They will know or be able to quickly find solutions to common
problems with their packages. There are some caveats to that statement,
so let me get to a bit more meat.
Let's face it--the packages in RHEL4 for Samba are just plain old. Red
Hat has back-ported security fixes and even some bug fixes, but I know
without a doubt that not all bugs have been addressed. RHEL5 will be out
in the coming future. Perhaps it will provide newer packages. I urge you
to investigate and consider that route if you are extremely nervous
about losing support on Samba from them.
In my case, I've chosen to move my production File Server to Ubuntu 6.06
Server (well, I have loaded the latest distro upgrade) running Samba
3.0.22 after I complete quite a bit of testing. I just found myself
banging my head against the wall with my smb.conf in ways that I
shouldn't have to since the problems were with bugs in the older Samba
that haven't been back-ported. The instant I transferred my smb.conf
over to the new Ubuntu server, my bugs went away. The one exception is
the archive bit issue I've been posting about lately.
The bottom line in my humble opinion is that if you go your own way, you
shift burden of responsibility more to yourself than Red Hat. Of course,
if you have the hardware (or a VMWare/Xen virtual server) you could
always run parallel using two servers with a Red Hat approved Samba
version as a control and your own Samba server with identical
configurations (minus Samba version) for production and work out non-bug
related issues with their help on your reference server. This won't help
you in resolving bug-related issues, but it could help provide you with
a warm fuzzy-feeling. This would be less than ideal since the versions
are so far apart.
I know you asked for technical reasons, but you should be aware that not
all of the factors in the equation are technical when considering a
production server.
Hope that helps.
Aaron Kincer
Alex de Vaal wrote:
Hello,
A while ago I asked what kind of Samba packages I could use on
RHEL4. If I use the packages from www.samba.org then I'd void
the support agreement with Red Hat. (...)
Downloading and investigating the latest Samba source package from
RHN (samba-3.0.10-1.4E.9.src.rpm) told me that the Samba package
of RHN is based on the native 3.0.10 Samba package of samba.org
with some necessary patches (samba-3.0.10-winbindd_2k3sp1.patch,
samba-3.0.10-ldap-failover-timeout-backport.patch are the most important
ones for me), while even the patches come from samba.org
In samba-3.0.10-ldap-failover-timeout-backport.patch I found this statement:
+ /* Setup alarm timeout.... Do we need both of these ? JRA. */
This is from Jeremy Allison of samba.org...
Is there any technical reason NOT to use the packages of samba.org on RHEL4?
Regarding the above info I'd like to use the original samba packages on
RHEL4.
If I only void support for Samba at Red Hat, so be it. I'm convinced I'm
better off
with Samba support at samba.org...
Regards,
Alex.
-----Original Message-----
From: Gerald (Jerry) Carter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday 12 July 2006 13:22
To: Alex de Vaal
Cc: samba@lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: [Samba] Fedora packages or Enterprise packages of Samba on
RHEL4?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Alex de Vaal wrote:
Can somebody of the Samba team explain me the difference of Fedora
packages or Enterprise packages
(http://enterprisesamba.com/) of Samba on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4?
...
First I tried the RHEL4 packages from enterprisesamba.com, but these
packages always ended up with the error message "Segmentation fault"
while I used "net ads join";
If you need support for the SerNet packages, you will have to contact
SerNet.
Therefore I compiled the Fedora source package on RHEL4; this went
well.
...
I'd like to continue with the Fedora Samba package on my RHEL4 server,
but I'd like to know why or why NOT to use it! (and why I have to use
the packages of
enterprisesamba.com)
The Fedora specfile provided with Samba is compatible with RHEL4. I don't
build RHEL4 packages only because IMO if you pay for support for RedHat,
installing non-vendor supplied packages would void your support agreement.
Althought I could provide RPMS for the lates version of CentOS which should
be binary comatible with RHEL4 systems.
While I'm at it, is there any pressing need for 64-bit rpms as well?
cheers, jerry
=====================================================================
Samba ------- http://www.samba.org
Centeris ----------- http://www.centeris.com
"What man is a man who does not make the world better?" --Balian
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