Troubleshooting Samba

Samba Logs

Your first line of attack should always be to check the log files. The Samba log files can help diagnose the vast majority of the problems that beginning to intermediate Samba administrators are likely to face. Samba is quite flexible when it comes to logging. By default, logs are placed in samba_directory /var/smbd.log and samba_directory /var/nmbd.log, where samba_directory is the location where Samba was installed (typically, /usr/local/samba).

 Log levels

The level of logging that Samba uses can be set in the smb.conf file using the global log level or debug level option, The logging level is an integer which ranges from 0 (no logging), and increases the logging to voluminous by log level = 3. For example, let's assume that we are going to use a Windows client to browse a directory on a Samba server. For a small amount of log information, you can use log level = 1, which instructs Samba to show only cursory information, in this case only the connection itself:

UNIX Utilities

Sometimes it's useful to use a tool outside of the Samba suite to examine what's happening inside the server. UNIX has always been a "kitchen-sink" operating system. Two diagnostic tools can be of particular help in debugging Samba troubles: trace and tcpdump.