Samba SWAT

2008 Nov 23 at 02:38 » Tagged as :virtualization, python,

I have mentioned here and there that I am using usmb to mount remote folders. It was only after a little bit of head scratching that I manged to figure it out though. Samba server is one of those things that I never really learned to setup/use. So I decided to take the easy way out and to install the Samba Web Administration Tool (SWAT). That didn't quite work out.

Connection Interrupted The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading. The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.

At first I thought this was an SSL error but it wasn't anything like that. I found the solution in an old mailing list entry made by one Cris Nolan: http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2002-August/049448.html SWAT still relies on xinetd, been a long time since I ran into a daemon that does so. Once xinetd was editing usmb could be started easily and mostly it works fine. However if it's left ideling and the computer goes to sleep the connection is dropped. You can easily unmount and mount it again and most things are uneffected but there is an exception. VirtualBox goes crazy when that happens. That's because my virtual machines actualy reside on the remote folder. If the machine goes to sleep VirtualBox just dies off and even completely refuses to start up again. That leaves me wondering if I should go back to ftpfs.