short answer: Because after installing some packages, my system was malfunctioning with substantial breakage of the printing system, I used the synaptic package manager to uninstall both Samba and CUPS, then I manually deleted/moved the /etc/samba folder to ensure that the configs would be recreated when I reinstalled.
Long answer see below especially item #5. ------------- as I see it, there are 5 bugs here.... 1) There is the design issue with Ubuntu itself. If you want to achieve mass adoption of Ubuntu (which it fully deserves) then it MUST be able to interoperate with MS Windows computers "out of the box". Currently it takes a computer expert in order to be able to install and configure Samba to be able to share printers and files. That has to change, it has to be possible for end users with a minimum of skill to be able to right click on a folder or printer and choose sharing and have it work; and to be able to do this without installing and configuring any additional software. 2) Samba is fundamentally broken. I have now spent *days* searching the web and reading the docs and trying the example configs and I still can't get it to work with Windows 98, I keep getting a password prompt and no matter what I enter it gets rejected. I did not yet find the solution to the problem, but I did find other people complaining about the same problem. I have tried what some people said should work and it does not work for me. Now for comparision, I also have installed Mephis Linux and pcLinuxOS and I was able to get Samba to work on both of those computers, Mephis basically worked out of the box, but Samba tended to crash a lot. pcLinuxOS took a but of fuss to get it working properly but once working it doesn't crash the way that Mephis did and it does work with Win 98. Those distros are old, Mephis is from about 3 or 4 years ago and pcLinuxOS is from about 2 years ago, Ubuntu on the other hand has all the latest and greatest versions of software and for the most part it really is much better than any other of the numerous distros I've tried. But this Samba is royally screwed up and does not work the way it is supposed to. Now quite possibly I missed installing some package or other that Samba needs because after all, with the lack of Ubuntu specific docs on the subject I have had to guess at which packages I need to install. 3) Installing certain packages causes breakage. After I installed and used gsambad and a couple of other packages I could no longer get the printer configuration dialog (system-config-printer) to run/open it would crash instead. This might be related to bug #135321 This is why I ended up uninstalling Samba and CUPS and starting over. Which is what caused bug 5 to occur. 4) (Fit and Finish) The package called "system-config-printer" and the package called "gnome-cups-manager" both create an identical menu entry called system/administration/Printer. These two packages both provide overlapping but not identical functionality, I found it useful to have both installed, they should use different names for their menu entries. 5) This is the crash that caused this bug entry to be created, but this is the least of the problems. In fact this problem is not likely to ever occur if the first 3 bugs above are fixed. The crash is caused because I uninstalled Samba and then I removed the /etc/samba/smb.conf. When I reinstalled Samba I expected it to create a pristine new copy of smb.conf. Instead what it does is crash during the install -- which by the way renders Synaptic Package unusable. Even more strangely is that when I restored smb.conf from a backup and then reinstalled Samba, it prompted me and said smb.conf already exists do you want to replace it with the one from the package maintainer. I told it yes to replace it, but after the install was complete I looked at the smb.conf and found that it was the one I had put there, the file was not replaced despite asking me if I wanted it to do so. Happily, reinstalling did fix the breakage which occurred in bug 3 above. But I still don't have a working Samba, although with certain configs I did manage to get XP to be able to have way tooo much access... major security issues there, but I still never got Win 98 to be able to talk to it. By the way, I can access shared folders just fine from another Linux computer. This broken folder sharing functionality is specific to Windows 98. But none of them will print via Samba, I did ultimately get printing to work using IPP which is a bypass of Samba. ----------- Okay, so that is what this bug is about. As far as I am concerned the actual crash #5 -- which generated this bug -- is mostly a non-issue, fix the other bugs and the circumstances that caused the crash is unlikely to occur. I am not familiar with your bug tracking system, but many would split this into 5 separate entires in order to track each issue separately, on the other hand I've also encountered some very hostile projects out there -- which shall remain nameless -- who would complain mightily if I did that. So I leave it to you to decide what you want to do with these 5 issues that I have outlined above. -- samba nightmare https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/251469 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Server Team, which is subscribed to samba in ubuntu. -- Ubuntu-server-bugs mailing list Ubuntu-server-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server-bugs
