Basic validations of the Samba's installation

We need to have automated deployments, and that includes automated tests. It's really important to have proper tests for all of our deployments, because that is the guarantee that everything is the way we are used to and the way we expect it to be. I'm used to saying that in IT, everything needs to be an "Automated beast" and not a "Masterpiece". With that in mind, we do not stand in front of the servers to draw like Da Vinci (even if we could). However, we need to have everything automated (scripted), so it can be easily reproduced, and we can create, destroy, and recreate the whole environment without any effort.

The Samba 4 project helps us a lot with its built-in test suite, which is a great starting point for our environment's validation. Just issue the following command:

leal@debian7:~$ sudo make quicktest

We will receive a verbose output that will report the execution of many invaluable tests to verify whether our Samba 4 Server's installation is fully working. Pay close attention to each line as you'll be able to follow the status of each test that is being executed.

In case of any failure, we will need to review all of our installation and configuration steps to see what point was not executed properly. We need to pass this step cleanly to actually proceed to our Samba 4 Server configuration. The following is an excerpt of an example execution of the test suite:

[250/310 in 43m52s] samba4.raw.write(dc)
[251/310 in 43m53s] samba4.raw.rename(dc)
[252/310 in 43m55s] samba4.raw.qfsinfo(dc)
[253/310 in 43m55s] samba4.raw.qfileinfo(dc)
[254/310 in 43m56s] samba4.raw.close(dc)
[255/310 in 43m56s] samba4.raw.mkdir(dc)
[256/310 in 43m56s] samba4.raw.ioctl(dc)
[257/310 in 43m56s] samba4.raw.seek(dc)
[258/310 in 43m57s] samba4.raw.eas(dc)
[259/310 in 43m57s] samba4.raw.qfileinfo.ipc(dc)
[260/310 in 43m57s] samba4.ntvfs.cifs.krb5.base.delete(dc)
…
ALL OK (2061 tests in 310 testsuites)

A summary with detailed information can be found in:

./st/summary
'testonly' finished successfully (50m11.201s)

All tests must pass OK, as you can see in the preceding code so we can perform the installation of the binaries into their final destination (/usr/local/).

You can do this by issuing the following command:

leal@debian7:~$ sudo make install

This command will copy all the required files to their final destination on our filesystem. So, we will have the Samba 4 Server properly installed and ready to be configured and provide our network services.