31.1 Features and Benefits

SWAT is a facility that is part of the Samba suite. The main executable is called swat and is invoked by the inter-networking super daemon. See Section 31.2.2 for details.

SWAT uses integral samba components to locate parameters supported by the particular version of Samba. Unlike tools and utilities that are external to Samba, SWAT is always up to date as known Samba parameters change. SWAT provides context-sensitive help for each configuration parameter, directly from man page entries.

There are network administrators who believe that it is a good idea to write systems documentation inside configuration files, and for them SWAT will aways be a nasty tool. SWAT does not store the configuration file in any intermediate form, rather, it stores only the parameter settings, so when SWAT writes the smb.conf file to disk, it will write only those parameters that are at other than the default settings. The result is that all comments, as well as parameters that are no longer supported, will be lost from the smb.conf file. Additionally, the parameters will be written back in internal ordering.

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Before using SWAT, please be warned ” SWAT will completely replace your smb.conf with a fully-optimized file that has been stripped of all comments you might have placed there and only non-default settings will be written to the file.