[Xastir] Samba Peculiarity

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 08:43:30PM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <ve7did at dccnet.com> flavor, containing:
> Perhaps most of you know this, but the other day I happened to be 
> watching my transmit led on the TNC and noticed some long (10 seconds or 
> so) continuous transmissions being generated by my station every 15 or 
> so minutes.  I am using the TNC's in KISS Mode running 3 different 
> functions. Normally you may not notice this as the transmissions are not 
> heard by the sending station.  After monitoring it with the listen 
> command there was all kinds of "junk" being sent.
> So, after much fiddling around and head scratching it turned out to be 
> Samba which was generating this info.  It looks like it was sending info 
> to all ports, perhaps broadcasting itself to other computers on a 
> network.  Goofy thing is I'm not even using Samba yet and it was 
> installed by default with Slackware. ( I just upgraded to the newer 
> version and upgraded to a slightly new computer).
> 
> So, if you happen to be listening to the aprs network and you hear long 
> transmissions about every 15 or 20 minutes, there is a good chance 
> someone else running xastir in kiss mode with Samba running.  I'm sure 
> there must be a way in Samba to select which ports you want these 
> broadcasts to go out on, but I haven't played with it yet, so I killed 
> it for the time being.

This is a well-known issue with kernel AX.25 networking and samba.  Yes, by
default Samba binds to all network interfaces and sends out "I'm here" packets
to them.

There is indeed a way to shut it off.

In your smb.conf file you need to have an "interfaces" line that lists the
network interfaces you want samba to use.  Then you have a 
"bind interfaces only" line that tells samba to use *only* the interfaces 
listed in that line.

If you use "swat" to manage your samba configuration, there's certainly a way
to do it there, too.

On the "Globals" page of the SWAT configuration tool, look under "Base Options"
and add your valid network interfaces to the "interfaces" box.  Then set 
"bind interfaces only" to "Yes" and commit changes, and restart your daemons.  
It should no longer touch your ax.25 interfaces.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
  In some cultures what I do would be considered normal. 
                                  -- Ineffective daily affirmation