Exploring Samba's new registry-based configuration

net (rpc) registry

Samba's swiss army knife net basically has built-in command line versions of regedit: net registry to access the local registry and net rpc registry to access a remote registry over RPC. Although these tools are almost as clumsy as regedit, they do allow the administrator to produce more convenient custom tools with Unix shell scripts. Table 2 shows the available subcommands of net registry, and Listing 3 demonstrates an example of configuration tasks. The use of net rpc registry is completely analogous – you just call it as net -Uuser rpc registry … or even net -Uuser%password rpc registry … when it is too inconvenient to type the password at the prompt for each call.

Listing 3

Example net registry Session

01 # net registry
02 enumerate HKLM/software/samba/smbconf
03 Keyname   = share1
04 Modtime   = Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 CET
05
06 Keyname   = global
07 Modtime   = Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 CET
08
09 # net registry enumerate HKLM/software/samba/smbconf/global
10 Valuename  = netbios name
11 Type       = REG_SZ
12 Value      = "nirvana"
13
14 Valuename  = workgroup
15 Type       = REG_SZ
16 Value      = "samba"
17
18 Valuename  = security
19 Type       = REG_SZ
20 Value      = "user"
21
22 # net registry setvalue HKLM/software/samba/smbconf/global "passdb backend" SZ tdbsam
23 # net registry enumerate HKLM/software/samba/smbconf/global
24 Valuename  = netbios name
25 Type       = REG_SZ
26 Value      = "nirvana"
27
28 Valuename  = workgroup
29 Type       = REG_SZ
30 Value      = "samba"
31
32 Valuename  = security
33 Type       = REG_SZ
34 Value      = "user"
35
36 Valuename  = passdb backend
37 Type       = REG_SZ
38 Value      = "tdbsam"
39
40 # net registry deletevalue HKLM/software/samba/smbconf/global security
41 # net registry enumerate HKLM/software/samba/smbconf/global
42 Valuename  = netbios name
43 Type       = REG_SZ
44 Value      = "nirvana"
45
46 Valuename  = workgroup
47 Type       = REG_SZ
48 Value      = "samba"
49
50 Valuename  = passdb backend
51 Type       = REG_SZ
52 Value      = "tdbsam"

net conf

net registry is pretty chatty and clumsy for day-to-day administration tasks, so net now comes with a dedicated registry configuration interface offered by the new net conf command. Table 3 provides a summary of net conf options.

The net conf list command outputs the complete configuration in smb.conf format, whereas net conf import imports a smb.conf text file into the registry, dropping all previous data. This way, one can easily switch back and forth between registry- and text-based configuration if necessary (Listing 4).

Listing 4

Example net conf Session

01 # net conf list
02 # cat smb.conf.input
03 [global]
04         netbios name = nirvana
05         workgroup = samba
06         passdb backend = tdbsam
07         security = user
08
09 [share1]
10         path = /data/samba/shares/share1
11         read only = no
12         vfs objects = recycle
13
14 # net conf import smb.conf.input
15 # net conf list
16 [global]
17         netbios name = nirvana
18         workgroup = samba
19         passdb backend = tdbsam
20         security = user
21
22 [share1]
23         path = /data/samba/shares/share1
24         read only = no
25         vfs objects = recycle
26
27 # net conf setparm global "log level" 10
28 # net conf delparm global security
29 # net conf setincludes global /etc/samba/smb.conf.%I
30 # net conf setparm share2 path /data/samba/shares/share2
31 # net conf list
32 [global]
33         netbios name = nirvana
34         workgroup = samba
35         passdb backend = tdbsam
36         log level = 10
37         include = /etc/samba/smb.conf.%I
38
39 [share1]
40         path = /data/samba/shares/share1
41         read only = no
42         vfs objects = recycle
43
44 [share2]
45         path = /data/samba/shares/share2
46
47 # net conf drop
48 # net conf list
49 #

Writing GUIs

An abstraction layer called libsmbconf presents all necessary methods to access Samba's registry configuration from C code. net conf and the server use libsmbconf to access the registry. The Samba project site has more details on the API [5]. libsmbconf is not published as a shared library because of linking dependencies to a lot of Samba internal code that is not yet properly chopped into shared libraries. Eventually the idea is to release libsmbconf so that it's easy to write third-party applications to configure Samba. A first example application called netdomjoin-gui is available with the Samba code. netdomjoin-gui is a Gtk program that joins your Samba into an active directory domain, modifying the registry configuration accordingly. It is modeled on the native Windows join dialog. The code is under lib/netapi/examples/netdomjoin-gui in Samba's source tree.

To compile the application, use make -C lib/netapi/examples; afterwards, you will find the binary in lib/netapi/examples/bin/netdomjoin-gui. Starting with a smb.conf file that contains config backend = registry and an empty registry configuration, the administrator calls netdomjoin-gui (Figure 3). Listing 5 shows the registry configuration after the process is finished.

Listing 5

Registry Configuration after the Join

01 [global]
02         workgroup = ADSVMW
03         security = ads
04         realm = ads.vmware.private

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