Hello Everyone.

At school we are using an old samba server with Slackware 9.0, With Windows 98 clients. Currently we just finally upgraded our clients hardware which came with XP Pro. I went about creating a test network with Slack 12 using samba 3 as a active directory replacement which works well. even enjoying the roaming profiles. But now I need to either upgrade our own server to slack 12 which would cause a bit of downtime. or just upgrade samba. as of now the samba version we are using is 2.28 which was at the time compiled and installed from source. and set to boot from rc.local. I'm new to samba administration. What would be the best approach. Is it as easy as backing up my smbpasswd file. the smb.conf and just replacing it with a new default package? We have around 200 students accounts on the system. What would be a proper approach to backup, upgrade, and restore samba.

Thanks for any advice.

If data is important you !always! have to backup the data before you do anything. Downtime can be solved by late night upgrade
If the server is stable and everything I would just upgrade Samba, unless the server is used for anything else, and still depends on what else is it used for.

Thats the big problem I'm worried about. Its also a BIND, Apache, MySQL, and Squid Server gateway With Postfix and Spam Assassin. Personally I won't have samba st up on a system capable of being accessed externally. But this was set up long before I took the position.

Hi,

First, are your system backups current? If not then you should have a system backup methodology. Linux-Complete-Backup-and-Recovery-HOWTO is a place to start.

You could just copy a image of the hard drive. That would be better than nothing but the image would not be current because of daily/hourly/minute changes. A 24/7 backup method would be the best. How valuable is your data? How current do you require the backup?

You can do a google to get loads of information on backup methods.

As for your question about migration, I would build a parallel system to test the platform. That way any gotcha(s) will show up on that test bed. Testing would depend on how many clients you wish to support with the test system.

edit: BTW, welcome to LQ!

Well if the server isn't used externally it would be enough to upgrade samba only.
But you can update all software used and recompile the kernel. It will still be safe enough for external use.
If you don't want to upgrade the whole distribution.