Comment 4 for bug 50385

On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 17:33, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Is there a reason you wouldn't symlink or bind-mount /var/lib/samba to
> point to your shared disk? This is the FHS-mandated location for such
> data, and everything in this directory (not just the secrets.tdb) would
> be relevant to an HA system. There is very little reason why it should
> be necessary to support arbitrary directory paths for these files in a
> Debian system.

There's one major reason to do so. If you're running more than one samba
daemon (or program for that matter) on the box. A little about my setup:

I have 2 machines acting as a small cluster with heartbeat. They have an
IP address that fails over between them, depending on which one is
active. Samba fails over and is set up using 'bind interfaces only' to
listen on this address. I also have 'netbios name' set in smb.conf.

I'm also running winbind on this machine to handle authentication.
Winbind uses the hostname of the box as its netbios name. So, we have a
problem here. The machine account info is stored in secrets.tdb, but we
have 2 machine accounts that we have to deal with. One for the samba
daemon (working on the floating IP address), and one for winbind.

I don't have a problem with FHS (actually it's a great standard). I just
need it to work when I override the default settings. I'm not certain
that the --with-fhs setting is the problem here either, but it seemed
like the only configure setting that dealt with changing the location of
private dir, and I didn't use it when I built samba for my Solaris
boxes.

Thanks,
Jeff