I’ve installed Samba on my Debian 12 home server but can’t get it to start. I ran:
sudo systemctl start smbd
sudo systemctl status smbd
Here is the output:
Duration: 7h 25min 18.079s
Condition: start condition failed at Fri 2025-02-14 17:13:11 EST; 14min ago
Docs: man:smbd(8)
man:samba(7)
man:smb.conf(5)
Process: 598599 ExecCondition=/usr/share/samba/is-configured smb (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
CPU: 1ms
Feb 14 17:13:11 harvee systemd[1]: Starting smbd.service - Samba SMB Daemon...
Feb 14 17:13:11 harvee systemd[1]: smbd.service: Skipped due to 'exec-condition'.
Feb 14 17:13:11 harvee systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in smbd.service - Samba SMB Daemon being skipped.
The install also doesn’t seem to have created a samba configuration directory in /etc or a log in /var/log
I’m stumped. Googling turns up a lot of people accidentally checking the status of ‘samba’ instead of ‘smbd’, but I’m not finding much on this issue. What am I doing wrong?
Pretty sure samba won’t do anything if you haven’t configured it. Make sure you do some basic setup first:
https://wiki.debian.org/Samba/ServerSimple
Yeah, I was trying to figure out why the install didn’t create a config file or a log file. Can’t do setup without the config.