launchd and Samba

[Greg]

Any particular reason why the smbd and nmbd launchd plists have their disabled flag set? The reason I ask is because nmbd goes down occasionally for no apparent reason. I’m not connected to AD, this is purely a 10.4.2 server with quite a few W2K clients.

So I thought that I’d write a nice little script & launchd plist to check every x minutes to see if nmbd is, in fact, running and if it’s not to “serveradmin stop smb” and then “serveradmin start smb”. But before I did that, I looked inside /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. I see that there are already plists for both smbd & nmbd. Nice. So why aren’t they running? Oh. They’re disabled.

Anyone know why? Would it be a bad thing to enable them?

[Greg]

I did a little checking and found that on 10.4 client, smbd and nmbd are also disabled by default in their respective LaunchDaemon plist files. But if you turn on Windows Sharing in the System Preferences, the Disabled flag disappears…the plist files are changed.

So is there a reason why turning on Windows services in 10.4 server should be different and not alter these same launchd plist files? Or is this maybe an oversight in servermanager?

[Author]

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