Taking a SWAT at Samba
September 6, 2006
For many years HP 3000 sites wished they had what they saw on other systems. Then in the late 1990s the community got a lot of what it wanted. By 1999 the platform got the Samba file sharing system, a universal utility you find on nearly every computer.
Samba arrived because of two community coding kings: Lars Appel, who ported the Samba open source package to the 3000, and Mark Klein, who ported the bootstrap toolbox to make such ports possible. As John Burke said in the sunnier year of 1999:
Without Mark Klein’s initial porting of and continued attention to the Gnu C++ compiler and utilities on the HP 3000, there would be no Apache/iX, syslog/iX, sendmail/iX, bind/iX, etc. from Mark Bixby, and no Samba/iX from Lars Appel. And the HP 3000 would still be trying to hang on for dear life, rather than being a player in the new e-commerce arena.
So Samba is there on your HP 3000, so long as you've got an MPE version minted in the last six years or so. But getting started with it might perplex a few managers, like the one who just asked how to get Samba up on its feet on his 3000. One superb addition is SWAT, the Samba administration tool. Yup, the 3000's got that, too.
As a total network newbie, I tried to get Samba up and running from the directions at docs.hp.com, but failed miserably. Do you need Samba running before you can run SWAT? Where can I find the instructions for Samba on the 3000 for the complete idiot?
When this user asked how to Samba, OpenMPE director Donna Garverick-Hofmeister showed off some steps (her reply here de-Donna-ized with capital letters)
I’ve not tried SWAT. I remember a HP World presentation on Samba that included how to get SWAT to work. The presenter said something about having to add certain ports to your services file (maybe... It’s been a long time... and I think I glazed over at that point.
1. What OS version are you on? And Samba’s version?
2. When you click on explore your network on your PC (aka network neighborhood, in old-speak) is there a domain/workgroup name? Did you add that to your smb.conf file? Is your MPE server on the same network as the rest of your servers?
3. Did you edit smb.conf with vi or another bytestream-friendly editor?
4. In smb.conf, is interfaces set correctly to your MPE system’s IP address and mask?
5. You probably don’t want to be a domain master or preferred master.Samba is generally pretty easy to get started. There’s not a whole lot to change in the smb.conf file (adding logons is a bit different though). A few minor changes and Samba should start up.
In addition to Donna's advice, we can add a few pointers to help. First, SWAT runs on the HP 3000 fine. Have a look at the HP Jazz Web page about the last version of Samba to see a SWAT confirmation. SWAT's been around since we took note of when Appel ported it, in 2002.
HP's Jazz page also includes links to Samba resources. SWAT has its worldwide features cataloged on a Web page at Samba.org.
So Samba and SWAT still help the 3000 play in the now-not-so-new e-commerce arena, as well in other neighborhoods.