Chapter 37. SWAT: The Samba Web Administration Tool

John H. Terpstra

Samba Team

<jht@samba.org>

April 21, 2003

Table of Contents

Features and Benefits

Guidelines and Technical Tips

Validate SWAT Installation
Enabling SWAT for Use
Securing SWAT through SSL
Enabling SWAT Internationalization Support

Overview and Quick Tour

The SWAT Home Page
Global Settings
Share Settings
Printers Settings
The SWAT Wizard
The Status Page
The View Page
The Password Change Page

+ + + There are many and varied opinions regarding the usefulness of SWAT. No matter how hard one tries to produce the perfect configuration tool, it remains an object of personal taste. SWAT is a tool that allows Web-based configuration of Samba. It has a wizard that may help to get Samba configured quickly, it has context-sensitive help on each smb.conf parameter, it provides for monitoring of current state of connection information, and it allows networkwide MS Windows network password management. -

Features and Benefits

- +

Features and Benefits

+ SWAT is a facility that is part of the Samba suite. The main executable is called swat and is invoked by the internetworking super daemon. See appropriate section for details.

- + SWAT uses integral Samba components to locate parameters supported by the particular version of Samba. Unlike tools and utilities that are external to Samba, SWAT is always up to date as known Samba parameters change. SWAT provides context-sensitive help for each configuration parameter, directly from man page entries.

- - - + + + Some network administrators believe that it is a good idea to write systems documentation inside configuration files, and for them SWAT will always be a nasty tool. SWAT does not store the configuration file in any intermediate form; rather, it stores only the @@ -30,38 +30,38 @@ those parameters that are at other than the default settings. The result is that as well as parameters that are no longer supported, will be lost from the smb.conf file. Additionally, the parameters will be written back in internal ordering.

Note

- + Before using SWAT, please be warned SWAT will completely replace your smb.conf with a fully optimized file that has been stripped of all comments you might have placed there and only nondefault settings will be written to the file. -

Guidelines and Technical Tips

- +

Guidelines and Technical Tips

+ This section aims to unlock the dark secrets behind how SWAT may be made to work, how it can be made more secure, and how to solve internationalization support problems. -

Validate SWAT Installation

- +

Validate SWAT Installation

+ The very first step that should be taken before attempting to configure a host system for SWAT operation is to check that it is installed. This may seem a trivial point to some, but several Linux distributions do not install SWAT by default, even though they do ship an installable binary support package containing SWAT on the distribution media.

- + When you have confirmed that SWAT is installed, it is necessary to validate that the installation includes the binary swat file as well as all the supporting text and Web files. A number of operating system distributions in the past have failed to include the necessary support files, even though the swat binary executable file was installed.

- - + + Finally, when you are sure that SWAT has been fully installed, please check that SWAT is enabled in the control file for the internetworking super-daemon (inetd or xinetd) that is used on your operating system platform. -

Locating the `SWAT` File

- - - +

Locating the `SWAT` File

+ + + To validate that SWAT is installed, first locate the swat binary file on the system. It may be found under the following directories:

/usr/local/samba/bin the default Samba location

/usr/sbin the default location on most Linux systems

/opt/samba/bin

@@ -71,9 +71,9 @@ by the administrator who compiled and installed Samba. There are a number of methods that may be used to locate the swat binary file. The following methods may be helpful.

- - - + + + If swat is in your current operating system search path, it will be easy to find it. You can ask what are the command-line options for swat as shown here:

@@ -91,7 +91,7 @@ Common samba options:
   -l, --log-basename=LOGFILEBASE       Basename for log/debug files
   -V, --version                        Print version

Locating the SWAT Support Files

Now that you have found that swat is in the search path, it is easy to identify where the file is located. Here is another simple way this may be done:

@@ -173,7 +173,7 @@ implementation. The control file (or files) can be located in the file
 or in a similar location.
 

 The control entry for the older style file might be:
-
+
 
 	# swat is the Samba Web Administration Tool
 	swat stream tcp nowait.400 root /usr/sbin/swat swat
@@ -201,10 +201,10 @@ In the above, the default setting for disable
 This means that SWAT is disabled. To enable use of SWAT, set this parameter to no
 as shown.
 

-
-
-
-
+
+
+
+
 Both of the previous examples assume that the swat binary has been
 located in the /usr/sbin directory. In addition to the above,
 SWAT will use a directory access point from which it will load its Help files
@@ -212,8 +212,8 @@ as well as other control information. The default location for this on most Linu
 systems is in the directory /usr/share/samba/swat. The default
 location using Samba defaults will be /usr/local/samba/swat.
 

-
-
+
+
 Access to SWAT will prompt for a logon. If you log onto SWAT as any non-root user,
 the only permission allowed is to view certain aspects of configuration as well as
 access to the password change facility. The buttons that will be exposed to the non-root
@@ -225,21 +225,21 @@ As long as you log onto SWAT as the user rootHOME, GLOBALS, SHARES, PRINTERS, 
 WIZARD, STATUS, VIEW, and PASSWORD.
-

Securing SWAT through SSL

- - +

Securing SWAT through SSL

+ + Many people have asked about how to set up SWAT with SSL to allow for secure remote administration of Samba. Here is a method that works, courtesy of Markus Krieger.

Modifications to the SWAT setup are as follows:

- + Install OpenSSL.

- - + + Generate certificate and private key. - +

 root# /usr/bin/openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -config \
 	/usr/share/doc/packages/stunnel/stunnel.cnf \
@@ -247,7 +247,7 @@ Modifications to the SWAT setup are as follows:

Remove SWAT entry from [x]inetd.

- + Start stunnel.

@@ -255,7 +255,7 @@ Modifications to the SWAT setup are as follows:
 	 -l /usr/local/samba/bin/swat swat

Afterward, simply connect to SWAT by using the URL https://myhost:901, accept the certificate, and the SSL connection is up. -

Enabling SWAT Internationalization Support

SWAT can be configured to display its messages to match the settings of the language configurations of your Web browser. It will be passed to SWAT in the Accept-Language header of the HTTP request. @@ -267,14 +267,14 @@ To enable this feature:

Set your browsers language setting.

- - - - + + + + The name of the msg file is the same as the language ID sent by the browser. For example, en means English, ja means Japanese, fr means French.

- + If you do not like some of messages, or there are no msg files for your locale, you can create them simply by copying the en.msg files to the directory for “your language ID.msg” and filling in proper strings @@ -284,20 +284,20 @@ to each “msgstr”. For example, in

- + and so on. If you find a mistake or create a new msg file, please email it to us so we will consider it in the next release of Samba. The msg file should be encoded in UTF-8.

- + Note that if you enable this feature and the display charset is not matched to your browser's setting, the SWAT display may be corrupted. In a future version of Samba, SWAT will always display messages with UTF-8 encoding. You will then not need to set this smb.conf file parameter. -

`Overview and Quick Tour`

+

`Overview and Quick Tour`

SWAT is a tool that may be used to configure Samba or just to obtain useful links to important reference materials such as the contents of this book as well as other documents that have been found useful for solving Windows networking problems. -

`The SWAT Home Page`

+

`The SWAT Home Page`

The SWAT title page provides access to the latest Samba documentation. The manual page for each Samba component is accessible from this page, as are the Samba3-HOWTO (this document) as well as the O'Reilly book “Using Samba.” @@ -312,7 +312,7 @@ because it runs SWAT without authentication and with full administrative ability changes to smb.conf as well as general operation with root privileges. The option that creates this ability is the -a flag to SWAT. Do not use this in a production environment. -

`Global Settings`

+

`Global Settings`

The GLOBALS button exposes a page that allows configuration of the global parameters in smb.conf. There are two levels of exposure of the parameters:

@@ -332,7 +332,7 @@ your changes will be lost. SWAT has context-sensitive help. To find out what each parameter is for, simply click on the Help link to the left of the configuration parameter. -

`Share Settings`

+

`Share Settings`

To affect a currently configured share, simply click on the pull-down button between the Choose Share and the Delete Share buttons and select the share you wish to operate on. To edit the settings, @@ -343,7 +343,7 @@ click on the To create a new share, next to the button labeled Create Share, enter into the text field the name of the share to be created, then click on the Create Share button. -

`Printers Settings`

+

`Printers Settings`

To affect a currently configured printer, simply click on the pull-down button between the Choose Printer and the Delete Printer buttons and select the printer you wish to operate on. To edit the settings, @@ -354,7 +354,7 @@ click on the To create a new printer, next to the button labeled Create Printer, enter into the text field the name of the share to be created, then click on the Create Printer button. -

`The SWAT Wizard`

+

`The SWAT Wizard`

The purpose of the SWAT Wizard is to help the Microsoft-knowledgeable network administrator to configure Samba with a minimum of effort.

@@ -370,7 +370,7 @@ Finally, there are a limited set of options that determine what type of server S will be configured for, whether it will be a WINS server, participate as a WINS client, or operate with no WINS support. By clicking one button, you can elect to expose (or not) user home directories. -

`The Status Page`

+

`The Status Page`

The status page serves a limited purpose. First, it allows control of the Samba daemons. The key daemons that create the Samba server environment are smbd, nmbd, and winbindd.

@@ -381,11 +381,11 @@ conditions with minimal effort.

Finally, the status page may be used to terminate specific smbd client connections in order to free files that may be locked. -

`The View Page`

+

`The View Page`

The view page allows you to view the optimized smb.conf file and, if you are particularly masochistic, permits you also to see all possible global configuration parameters and their settings. -

`The Password Change Page`

+

`The Password Change Page`

The password change page is a popular tool that allows the creation, deletion, deactivation, and reactivation of MS Windows networking users on the local machine. You can also use this tool to change a local password for a user account. -- cgit v1.2.3