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Samba pitfalls in daily operation

Skillful Guide

Article from ADMIN 52/2019

By Stefan Kania

Once you install Samba, you can still encounter errors, problems, and inconsistencies that plague your file server. We address some of these issues.

Samba has been the link in heterogeneous networks with Windows and Unix for many years. Once you have mastered the installation, though, everyday operation can present some potential pitfalls, to which you can only really respond correctly if you have prepared for the system errors. After discussing how to use a Samba file server securely in heterogeneous environments in a previous article [1], I will now look at problems that can occur during daily operations.

Replication Errors

At some point, you might notice that users you create on domain controller A are not listed on domain controller B. However, a user that you create on domain controller B is displayed on domain controller A. You then try to perform the replication manually and get the error message in Listing 1.

Listing 1

Error During Replication

root@addc-01:/tmp# samba-tool drs replicate addc-02 addc-01 dc=example,dc=net
ERROR(<class samba.drs_utils.drsException'>): DsReplicaSync failed - drsException: DsReplicaSync failed (58, 'WERR_BAD_NET_RESP')
   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ samba/netcmd/drs.py", line 389, in run drs_utils.sendDsReplicaSync(server_bind, server_bind_handle, source_dsa_guid, NC, req_options)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/samba/drs_utils.py", line 87, in sendDsReplicaSync
      raise drsException("DsReplicaSync failed %s" % estr)

No matter from which of the two domain controllers (DCs) you try to replicate, the same error message is always thrown. However, if you reverse the directions, the replication suddenly works. It looks as if the database can no longer

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