12.3 Extra Resources

At some point during your work with Samba, you'll want to turn to online or printed resources for news, updates, and aid.

12.3.1 Documentation and FAQs

It's OK to read the documentation. Really. Nobody can see you, and we won't tell. In fact, Samba ships with a large set of documentation files, and it is well worth the effort to at least browse through them, either in the distribution directory on your computer under /docs or online at the Samba web site: http://www.samba.org. The most current FAQ list, bug information, and distribution locations are located at the web site, with links to all the Samba manual pages and HOWTOs.

12.3.2 Samba Newsgroups

Usenet newsgroups have always been a great place to get advice on just about any topic. In the past few years, though, this vast pool of knowledge has developed something that has made it into an invaluable resource: a memory. Archival and search sites such as the one at Google (http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search) have made sifting through years of valuable solutions as simple as a few mouse clicks.

The primary newsgroup for Samba is comp.protocols.smb . This should always be your first stop when there's a problem. More often than not, spending 5 minutes researching an error here will save hours of frustration while trying to debug something yourself.

When searching a newsgroup, try to be as specific as possible, but not too wordy. Searching on actual error messages is best. If you don't find an answer immediately in the newsgroup, resist the temptation to post a request for help until you've done a bit more work on the problem. You might find that the answer is in a FAQ or one of the many documentation files that ship with Samba, or a solution might become evident when you run one of Samba's diagnostic tools. If nothing works, post a request in comp.protocols.smb , and be as specific as possible about what you have tried and what you are seeing. Include any error messages that appear. It might be days before you receive help, so be patient and keep trying things while you wait.

Once you post a request for help, keep poking at the problem yourself. Most of us have had the experience of posting a Usenet article containing hundreds of lines of intricate detail, only to solve the problem an hour later after the article has blazed its way across several continents. The rule of thumb goes something like this: the more folks who have read your request, the simpler the solution. Usually this means that once everyone in the Unix community has seen your article, the solution will be something simple such as, "Plug the power cord into the wall socket."

12.3.3 Samba Mailing Lists

The following are mailing lists for support with Samba. See the Samba home page, http://www.samba.org/, for information on subscribing and unsubscribing to these mailing lists:

[e-mail]

This is the primary mailing list for general questions and discussion regarding Samba.

[e-mail]

This list is for receiving news regarding Samba, such as announcements of new releases.

[e-mail]

By subscribing to this list, you can automatically receive a message every time one of the Samba developers updates the Samba source code in the CVS repository. You might want to do this if you are waiting for a specific bug fix or feature to be applied. To avoid congesting your email inbox, we suggest using the digest feature, which consolidates messages into a smaller number of emails.

[e-mail]

This list is for discussing Samba documentation.

[e-mail]

This mailing list is for people who are running Samba on the VMS operating system.

[e-mail]

This is a list for developers to use when discussing precompiled Samba distributions.

[e-mail]

This mailing list is for developer discussion of the Samba code.

Searchable versions of the Samba mailing list archives can be found at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com.

When posting messages to the Samba mailing lists, keep in mind that you are sending your message to a large audience. The notes in the previous section regarding Usenet postings also apply here. A well-formulated question or comment is more likely to be answered , and a poorly conceived message is very likely to be ignored!

12.3.4 Further Reading

1. Hunt, Craig. TCP/IP Network Administration , Third Edition. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 1997.

2. Hunt, Craig, and Robert Bruce Thompson. Windows NT TCP/IP Network Administration . Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 1998.

3. Albitz, Paul, and Cricket Liu. DNS and Bind , Fourth Edition. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 1998.

4. Stern, Hal. Managing NFS and NIS , Second Edition. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 1991.