[Samba] Building Samba RPMs on CentOS 7 as an alternative to Sernet packages

[Darren Bowen]

Hi there.

I'm new to Samba 4 and looking to use it as an alternative to a Microsoft
Active Directory domain controller. We run on CentOS 7 and I've read that
the Samba packages for this distro don't support AD due to using MIT
Kerberos instead of Heimdal. This lead me to trying the Sernet pacakges,
which work great, but they are restricted to 7.2 for the free version. I'm
keen not to end up on an unsupported version so have been looking at
building Samba from source instead.

I managed to build and install Samba from source without too much trouble,
it works great but it takes a long time to build and isn't overly suitable
for our configuration management system (Puppet). I'd prefer to be able to
build RPMS and install them on any machine (running the same version of
CentOS), but I'm not sure how to do this or whether it may be beyond my
level of experise as I don't have any experience building RPM packages.

I'm looking for some advice on how to build RPMs from source, can I use the
various packaging scripts which are included with the release (I couldn't
find any details on how to use these) or do I need to configure the
packaging system from scratch?

[John Mulligan]

Post by Darren Bowen
Hi there.
I'm new to Samba 4 and looking to use it as an alternative to a Microsoft
Active Directory domain controller. We run on CentOS 7 and I've read that
the Samba packages for this distro don't support AD due to using MIT
Kerberos instead of Heimdal. This lead me to trying the Sernet pacakges,
which work great, but they are restricted to 7.2 for the free version. I'm
keen not to end up on an unsupported version so have been looking at
building Samba from source instead.
I managed to build and install Samba from source without too much trouble,
it works great but it takes a long time to build and isn't overly suitable
for our configuration management system (Puppet). I'd prefer to be able to
build RPMS and install them on any machine (running the same version of
CentOS), but I'm not sure how to do this or whether it may be beyond my
level of experise as I don't have any experience building RPM packages.
I'm looking for some advice on how to build RPMs from source, can I use the
various packaging scripts which are included with the release (I couldn't
find any details on how to use these) or do I need to configure the
packaging system from scratch?

Hi Darren,

I sometimes need to build custom RPM packages of Samba as well as a few other
things. Generally, what I do is to start with an existing source rpm, either
from CentOS/RHEL or Fedora and get that rpm building from source (rpmbuild -ba
path/to/spec). Then depending on how extensively I need to tweak the build
I'll either be able to get away with just changing arguments to the configure
script or maybe I'll do that and change some of the %files section. If its
really extensive there may be some patches that are not part of the original
source rpm.

In your case you can probably change the configure script arguments to require
the built-in kerberos and enable ad dc support. Then rpmbuild and see what
files get generated that are not currently listed in the spec file and add
them to the appropriate %files sections.


Hope that was useful,
--John M.

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Post by Darren Bowen
Hi there.
I'm new to Samba 4 and looking to use it as an alternative to a Microsoft
Active Directory domain controller. We run on CentOS 7 and I've read that
the Samba packages for this distro don't support AD due to using MIT
Kerberos instead of Heimdal. This lead me to trying the Sernet pacakges,
which work great, but they are restricted to 7.2 for the free version. I'm
keen not to end up on an unsupported version so have been looking at
building Samba from source instead.

My previous work along these lines is at
https://github.com/nkadel/samba4repo and has associated modules for
other samba related libraries. The big problem with the latest Samba 4
base releases is the updated gnutls requirements, which are *not*
available for CentOS 7. Samba 4.3 may be the final set of releases
compatible with domain controller use, and CentOS 7.

I've not gone back to resolve that, and don't know if the gnutls
requirement can be scaled back. But feel free to work with those tools
and enjoy the development experience.

Post by Darren Bowen
I managed to build and install Samba from source without too much trouble,
it works great but it takes a long time to build and isn't overly suitable
for our configuration management system (Puppet). I'd prefer to be able to
build RPMS and install them on any machine (running the same version of
CentOS), but I'm not sure how to do this or whether it may be beyond my
level of experise as I don't have any experience building RPM packages.
I'm looking for some advice on how to build RPMs from source, can I use the
various packaging scripts which are included with the release (I couldn't
find any details on how to use these) or do I need to configure the
packaging system from scratch?
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