sambacc - A Samba Container Configuration Tool

About

The sambacc is an young project that aims to consolidate and coordinate configuration of Samba, and related components, when running in a container. The configuration of one or many instances can be provided to the tool by way of a JSON file which then handles the low level details of actually configuring smbd and other elements in the container environment.

Rationale

Samba is a powerful and unique tool for implementing the SMB protocol and a software stack to support it on unix-like systems. However, it's potentially challenging to set up and manage many instances of Samba by-hand, especially when running under a container orchestration system.

The idea behind sambacc is mainly to automate all of the low level steps of setting up smbd, users, groups, and other supporting components. The tool is also designed to consume one "site-wide" configuration file that can be maintained across many container instances. sambacc is written in Python as samba provides Python bindings for some of the aspects of samba we need to control.

The sambacc library and samba-container CLI command are used by the samba-container project as part of the server container images.

Usage

File Server

The samba-container command is used to manage features related to the Samba file server and closely related components.

Without any additional arguments samba-container prints the synthesised samba (smb.conf) configuration based on the environment variables:

SAMBACC_CONFIG - configuration file(s)
SAMBA_CONTAINER_ID - Identity of this instance

Additionally, there are many other subcommands the tool supports. These include:

samba-container import - Import smb.conf-style settings into registry
samba-container import-users - Import users into /etc files and smb passdb
samba-container init - Initialize the container environment for use by samba services
samba-container run <service> - Initialize and run a named samba service

For a complete description of the subcommands supported, run:

samba-container --help

Active Directory Domain Controller

The samba-dc-container command is used to manage features related to the Samba AD DC server and related components.

Currently, samba-dc-container supports one subcommand. The run subcommand is used to start an AD DC server. This command supports various setup steps including steps to join an existing domain, provision a new domain, populate a domain with stock users/groups, etc.

For a complete description of the subcommands supported, run:

samba-dc-container --help

Features

Abstracts away some of the nitty-gritty details about what Samba expects in it's environment
Imports specific smb.conf settings from "site wide" JSON configuration.
Imports users and groups
Starts smbd with container friendly settings
Starts winbindd with container friendly settings
Support for joining AD
Support for managing CTDB clustering
Support for creating/joining Samba Active Directory servers

Major TODOs

A lot. Various things that are missing include:

Features to perform more secure (password-less) domain joins
Better integration (as opposed to unit) testing
Better use of APIs versus executing CLI commands

Install

Currently the only method of install is from source control.

Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/samba-in-kubernetes/sambacc
cd sambacc
Install locally: python -m pip install --user .

The test & build container may also be used to build source tarballs and wheels. Then you can distribute and install from the wheel if you need to.

Testing

Local testing

To run the entire unit test suite locally install tox and run tox in the repo root.

Because of the library and tooling that interacts with samba has some system level dependencies, not all test can be run locally.

Containerized testing

In addition to running the unit tests locally, I've created a container image for testing and building sambacc. It lives at ./tests/container. This is canonical way to run the test suite and is what is used by the CI tests. When run this way certain system packages can be installed, etc. to support running a wider range of test cases.

To produce builds using the container, mount a directory into the container at "/srv/dist" and set the environment variable SAMBACC_DISTNAME to a term of your choice (example: "latest"). This will then save the builds in a dir of that name in your output dir. Example:

$ mkdir -p $HOME/tmp/sambacc
$ podman run --rm \
  -v $HOME/tmp/sambacc:/srv/dist -e SAMBACC_DISTNAME=latest \
  quay.io/samba.org/sambacc:latest
$ ls $HOME/tmp/sambacc
latest
$ ls $HOME/tmp/sambacc/latest
sambacc-0.1.dev225+g10059ff-py3-none-any.whl  sha512sums
sambacc-0.1.dev225+g10059ff.tar.gz

License

GPLv3 as per the COPYING file.

This is the same license as used by Samba.

Contributing/Contact

Patches, issues, comments, and questions are welcome.

Resources:

Timdawson264/sambacc