While his competition in those qualifying races wasn’t super stiff, you could still see the mark of experience…As well as how strong and fit he is going into this competition. In both of those early heats he calmly hung out in the back of the pack waiting for the chance to make his move.

Then, when that chance came, he made it in a big way. In the second qualifying heat he passed all five other skaters with one huge burst of speed…flying past them so fast he easily gained, and held, a half-lap lead for the rest of the race.

Pretty impressive for a guy who’s old enough—and medaled enough—to retire happily. Yet here he is again, past the age when most speed skaters retire, and he’s never been more prepared to compete and win!

In a recent Seattle Times profile of Apolo Anton Ohno (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/olympics/2010986192_ohno07.html ), Ron Judd said “In his 13 years in the sport, Ohno has become an advanced student of short-track. He watches race tape like a football coach. He studies other teams’ training regimens. He has soaked up all the sports-performance knowledge thrown his way in a decade of residence at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and used it to retool his body to compete with younger racers whose legs don’t scream as loudly at the end of the day.”

By now you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with marketing your business. Well, there’s a lot you can learn from Ohno’s example.

Here’s a guy who has been competing successfully since he was 14 years old, yet he’s still trying to get better. And he does it by studying the competition, seeing what others have done and are doing today, then changing his own training regimen as a result. And practicing hard.

When was the last time you truly studied your competition’s marketing? Or analyzed what worked and what didn’t in your last marketing campaign?

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, the answer to both of those questions is: “Never!”

What about training? What are you doing to make sure your next marketing effort is more successful than your last? If the answer is nothing, then the chances are good that you’re not going to be any more successful down the road.

If you want to grow your business you’ve got to practice, train, and frankly, do what most other entrepreneurs don’t. Below are three things you can do right now to help turn yourself into an Olympic caliber entrepreneur:

1) Watch your competition. Ohno regularly looks at other teams training regimens. Then he takes what he learns and applies it to his own skating.

Most entrepreneurs never take the time to see what their competition is doing. Yet that’s one of the best ways to figure out what you could or should be doing to grow your business.

So take some time to do a bit of Internet research and see what your competition offers, how they offer it, what they charge, and how they market themselves.

2) Study.  Marketing is one of the most important aspects of running a business. Because if you don’t market your business effectively, no one will know you exist or what you have to offer and you won’t have any clients. Without clients you don’t have a business.

Yet few entrepreneurs spend any time at all studying marketing. While you can’t exactly watch and analyze race tapes, you CAN review books filled with winning advertising and marketing campaigns. Many books written by Ad greats John Caples or David Ogilvy are packed with sample ads and breakdowns of what made them great.

3) Practice. Olympic athletes practice a lot…WAY more than most entrepreneurs for sure. Apolo Ohno practice three times a day. And even then he still doesn’t always win in competition.

Few entrepreneurs practice marketing at all, yet they expect to win all the time. And are discouraged when they don’t.

Need to write new content for your Website? Don’t expect to get it perfect the first time. Create many practice drafts, then edit until it’s the best it can be. If you’re planning to send out a sales letter, write a few versions and test them. Then refine them until you’re getting the results you’re after. ?

Comments

To keep it simple, let’s look at some areas that you can change very quickly:

     1. Change your title and meta descriptions for the main pages on your site. If you have never looked at them before, then this is even more important. Not only do the engines consider the title tag one of the last of the on-page factors that are still relevant, your marketing message might have changed and your site could be behind the times. I tell folks to review these areas on a quarterly basis and make sure that your messaging is on point relative to your business goals.
  
   2. Change your level of involvement. If you are one of those folks who is completely on top of their Web site’s search marketing, then more power to you. I can safely say, however, that the overwhelming majority of site owners in the SMB space have not looked at their most important SEO factors in a very long time. SEO requires regular attention by someone in the know. It is not a "one and done" practice. Be sure you are ALWAYS involved in building new one-way inbound link partners. If your SEO efforts have been inconsistent, then it is likely that your reputation with the search engines has suffered.
 
   3. Change your agency. Wow. I can’t believe I just said that but it is something that should be considered often. There are many client-agency relationships that slip into a catatonic state, sapping the essential creativity needed for SEO success. You have the right to demand that your agency do what YOU need for success and not get caught up in a monthly set of deliverables that are routinely spit out to meet lax contractual obligations. If you are paying for creativity, then demand it or tell your current provider to pack their bags and take a hike.
 
   4. Change your clients. For you agency folks this may come as a shock but there are bad clients out there that drain your resources and turn unprofitable after some time. If that is the case, fire the client. What? Yup, you read that correctly. Fire the client. Agency relationships that are on auto pilot hurt both client and agency alike. If your client has been unresponsive, or unwilling to invest the resources for success, then guess who is at fault when the client complains about results. The agency will always be wrong. Avoid that by cleaning house of bad clients and looking to do good business with those who value your knowledge and time.
 
   5. Change your attitude. This is the big one. We are in uncertain times but your attitude toward your SEO efforts should correlate directly to the level of success you have. Search engine optimization is extremely attractive in an economic downturn. Efficiency and measurability make for very wise marketing budget spending. If you go for broke now, you stand to be in or near the front of the pack when things pick back up. Expect to win.

So it’s time for change. Take control. Make some money. Smile a little. Change can be good.

Comments

I bring this point up because I love search marketing. I love the potential that it has for making an average business much, much more than that. I love the "A-HA!" moments that occur when an SMB (small medium business) owner or marketer (or both) see the light and start to truly understand the value of search marketing. I love the fact that there is no other marketing vehicle, in my opinion, that allows the seller to be in front of the buyer at the exact time that the buyer expresses their greatest need. I love the directness of the medium and how it connects people so that things can happen whether it’s a purchase of a product or sharing of information. I mean really, as a marketer, what’s not to love?

Now all of those things are the front facing business application excitement of search marketing. I have passion around this because it can actually improve someone’s life to a certain degree. It’s impactful. Here’s where the collision I spoke of earlier occurs though. Unless there is that rare breed of search marketer who is completely tech savvy (not halfway or even 75% of the way, I mean a "knows their stuff" kind of person) and can do all of the behind the scenes stuff AND understands the business application the meeting or collision of these two sides most often is a conundrum, wrapped in a puzzle and gift wrapped with a question.

I would love to see some cooperation in the industry on this. I envision groups of like-minded professionals from both sides of this ledger sitting down and laying it out on the table. It would be cool for me to hear a real tech savvy guy lay out the logic for not being able to do something that appears easy to me from my non tech side of the tracks. I would love to have a chance to explain why in the world someone would want to do something that is not "standard practice" or needs to have something that is completely customized. I would also love the chance to explain what it requires to build relationships and trust with clients and just how fragile that can be.

Business is not clean. In fact, it is messy. So many variables are at play for each individual case that it is impossible to apply the same technique to everyone across the board and have success. Add to that mix that search marketing is an evolving discipline that can look different on a daily basis while other things in business stay the same for years. (Last time I checked debits and credits work the same now as they did in the Dark Ages, right?)

So are there folks out there on the tech side who would like someone to talk to them about the business side without looking down their nose at you? Are there sales or business application folks out there who would like to talk about the technical side of search marketing without being treated like that SNL character, Nick Burns, who just hates anyone who knows more numbers than 1′s and 0′s? Tell me your thoughts on bridging this gap so that we can all just get along and make our industry even better for those who depend on us to deliver the goods.

Comments

Small Biz Has An Attitude About Search

Those who follow the search industry and actively market their Internet presence in a variety of ways may be surprised to learn that a lot of their fellow entrepreneurs don’t do so.

That’s the determination Greg Sterling at Opus Research found in his study of current marketing trends among the SMB market. Of those respondents to the study’s survey, 59 percent do not do online marketing.

Roughly the same percentage of respondents claim over half their business comes from word of mouth or from referrals by other customers. Though businesses rate websites as importantly as they do local newspaper advertising, many aren’t making the same connection about online ads.

SMB spending has made the niche a highly desirable one for advertising companies. Sterling said the SMB market conservatively puts $30 billion in play for marketing and advertising services annually. They may want to consider more on the paid search and Internet advertising side.

“As a practical matter, Web sites without some other marketing element (e.g., SEM/SEO) aren

Sonasoft describes its products as a “high-availability solution, protecting data from hardware/software failures and human errors.” It also mentions that its software “is the focused solution for Microsoft servers.”

Andy Khanna, the president and CEO at Sonasoft, described the achievement, and his company’s plans for the future. “Sonasoft has made tremendous progress in the past six months and the product is getting great traction in the SMB market. We will be very aggressive in our customer acquisitions and we expect to grow even faster in the second half of 2006.”

The CEO of Netswitch agreed with Khanna’s assessment. “We see tremendous growth for SonaSafe and we strongly believe that Sonasoft will become one of the top players in backup/recovery and replication for Microsoft servers in the next couple of years,” said Stanley Li. To be fair, Li may not be an entirely impartial observer – his company is the “Master Distributor of Sonasoft products in Asia-Pacific region.” (And to be even more fair, this relationship isn’t a guarded secret – it’s plainly stated in the press release.)

Sonasoft lists Stanford University, Dolby, Vodafone, the Juilliard School, One World Health, Ophedge Investment, the Glide Foundation, University of Botswana, Phillips, the Abington Police Department, the University of San Diego, and Kokusai Semiconductor among its customers. Not a bad group. And 200 percent in six months – not a bad growth rate.

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

Intuit Inc., the software company that distributes popular accounting and business management programs like QuickBooks, Quicken, and TurboTax, announced a new service called QuickBooks Merchant Service for Web Stores, aimed at streamlining online sales, credit card payment processing, and sales reporting.

The company says it has worked with leading online store providers to become “QuickBooks-ready” like Affinity Internet, Prostores (eBay), GoDaddy.com, Homestead Technologies and WebSite Pros to develop the service and ensure compatibility.

“Intuit has a long tradition of making products and services that help small businesses be successful,” said Dan Wernikoff, director of product management for Intuit’s QuickBooks Merchant Service. “By working with these trusted e-commerce companies, we’ve extended the power of QuickBooks to help small business leverage the Web.”

The QuickBooks Merchant Service is tooled to help small businesses create a Web store, sell online, accept credit card payments and exchange business and sales data directly with QuickBooks. Business owners can also reconcile debit and credit card sales made via QuickBooks Merchant Service with the software.

Intuit says this compatibility can save business owners time by eliminating the need to manually reenter data. This enables quicker sales tracking, credit card payments, invoice and payment data and real-time financial reports in a central program.

“QuickBooks Merchant Service for Web Stores has made it easier for me to handle the back-end operations of our business,” said Chris Bruce, who manages the Web store for The Sleeter Group, a QuickBooks resource provider for accountants, bookkeepers and small business owners. “Integration with QuickBooks has been a big time-saving element for our business, which grossed $20,000 in online sales in less than four months.”

This happened to be a SCO Visionfs system, but you could run into similar problems with Samba.

A change in business practice required giving two other people read/write access to files in that directory.

The customer had forgotten that it had originally been restricted to only his user name, so he set up mapped drives on the other two users machines and of course couldn’t write to the necessary files. I was on site for other reasons, so he called me over to observe the problem.

I immediately reminded him that he probably set restrictions and we went into the Visionfs profedit tool to add the two new users and set the file creation mask appropriately.

I also chmodded the files on the server so that the group of these three users could write to the files.

We restarted the Visionfs server, and tried overwriting a file. That still failed from the new users machines.

I realized it had to be caching on the users machines, so disconnected the mapped drive, reconnected, and tried again. It still failed.

That surprised me. I expected that unmapping and remapping would clear the cache, but apparently it does not. On a whim, I tried deleting a file, and that was successful. Once that had been done, any of the users could now write and overwrite as desired.

I suppose that if I had rebooted the Windows machines that would have cleared up the problem also. Windows side SMB caching can be confusing.

There are various Samba notes you can find with Google; for example How *exactly* does the file caching mechanism work?. This is related to opportunistic locking, so that’s another Google search that can show you more about it. See Chapter 16. File and Record Locking Part III. Advanced Configuration in the Samba docs.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

Authors and advocates (e.g., Schroeder, 2004) dealt with the large enterprises, from both the manufacturing and service sectors; the smaller firms, known as Small Business, Minority Owned Business, SME (Small and Medium-size Enterprise), or SMB (Small and Medium-size Business), have been virtually ignored by them.

Definition and Characteristics

A Small and Medium-size Enterprise is defined differently, according to the purpose of each definition; the “UK Department of Trade & Industry” (2001) suggests that it is mainly because of the wide diversity of businesses. The UK Department provides a basic definition of SME, one that was used by the Bolton Committee in its 1971 Report on Small Firms: “a small firm is an independent business, managed by its owner or part-owners and having a small market share”.

The UK Department also comes with statistics and hard numbers for its definition; however, I’ll use a more updated, and broader definition of SME, which is given by “EU Commission” (2003):

The category of SME is made up of “autonomous enterprises” which employ fewer than 250 person and which have an annual turnover not exceeding EUR 50 million, and/or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding EUR 43 million. An “autonomous enterprise” is any enterprise that is not classified as a “partner enterprise”… or as a “linked enterprise”.

Partner enterprise is an enterprise (upstream enterprise), that holds, either solely or jointly, 25% or more of the capital or voting rights or another enterprise (downstream enterprise). [In the US it is normally called "small business" and depending on who owns it, perhaps a" minority owned business".

In the US, minority owned businesses often get breaks on public projects and contact awards; for example they can get a 5% higher score because of their minority status when being evaluated for public contracts in some cases.]

Exceptions are public investment corporations and venture capital companies that can hold more than 25%, provided the total investment is less than EUR 1.25 million. A “linked enterprise” is an enterprise that has a majority of shareholders’ or members’ voting rights in another enterprise… or has the right to exercise a dominant influence over another enterprise.

Within the SME category, a small enterprise is defined as an enterprise which employs fewer than 50 persons and whose annual turnover/ balance sheet total does not exceed EUR 10 million.

Within the SME category, a micro-enterprise is defined as an enterprise which employs fewer than 10 persons and whose annual turnover/ balance sheet total does not exceed EUR 2 million.

This distinction is strongly correlated with the firms’ organisation. Schlenker and Crocker (2003) suggest that micro-enterprises are more often a mixture of sole traders or sole proprietor organisations, which tend to behave as consultants rather than as corporate bodies. Small enterprises more often than not, begin to behave like corporate bodies, with a corporate culture and a clear division of responsibilities.

Medium sized enterprises often mirror their corporate counterparts with a distinct corporate culture and a dedicated IT function. The primary purpose of these firms, they suggest, is not to maximize revenues, but to generate an income for their owners; “they are more concerned with “quality of life” issues than stock value… only 3 per cent of all SMEs actually wish or are able to grow, in terms of either employment or turnover”.

Another characteristic of this sector, point out the authors, is that most firms do not possess several of the core processes (conception, manufacturing, sales, delivery, after sales service) normally associated with “doing business”.

As a result, SMEs are forced to collaborate with each other and with larger concerns to survive, to compete, and to produce sustainable revenues over time. A research carried out in 1992, found that 41% of UK SMEs competed primary on quality, 37% competed primary on price, 13% on time (lead-time and on-time delivery), and 9% of the SMEs competed primary on flexibility (Neely et al., 1994).

As for the growing importance of SME in the global economy, La-Rovere (1996) suggests that empirical studies show a clear trend towards reduction of size in firms of the manufacturing sector in developed countries.

Possible reasons for this are the diffusion of flexible modes of production and the downsizing of large firms. In addition, since the eighties SMEs have an increasingly important role in GDP in developed countries.

This is a result of the increasing importance of subcontracting and labour flexibility for competitiveness. The author points out that SMEs have grown in number because in many sectors barriers to entry of new firms were reduced and also because a greater motivation of workers. Empirical studies, done on the US and Italy, show that a firm’s size and its growth rate are negatively correlated. Nevertheless, argues La-Rovere, the reason why only 40% of American SMEs have a life-span above 6 years, is mainly because their lack of liquidity.

O’Gorman and Doran (1999) suggest that another factor that affects SMEs, characterised by strong entrepreneurial leadership, is their state of growth and ever-changing, which requires an increasing need for the introduction of formal structures, systems, procedures, and controls. Nevertheless, SMEs can achieve global competitiveness without necessarily increasing their actual size, argue Tetteh and Burn (2001), but rather, by building on their virtual or soft assets in order to expand. “These virtual assets include information skills, digital resources, and competencies for managing inter-firm relations and collaborative engagements with other firms”.

The World Bank Group’s Small and Medium Enterprise Department claims to “combine the market perspective of the International Finance Corporation with the policy expertise of the World Bank to promote local small business growth in developing nations” (last updated February 4th, 2004, website http://www2.ifc.org/sme/html/about_us.html).

SMEs play a key role in the developing countries’ economy, which is far greater than it is in the Western countries. “SME in Bulgaria” (2001) estimates that following the 1990s major privatisation, the number of SMEs accounts for over 98% of all registered economic entities; the vast majority of these are micro-enterprises with less than five employees, and their main activities in the retail. However, 46.5% of Bulgaria’s workers in 1999 were employed by SMEs; a figure that is lower than the EU average.

A study in Brazil shows that small and micro enterprises (up to 100 employees) represent 51% of national production, 42% of wages, 65% of employment and 99% of enterprises registered in the country (“SEBRAE”, 1991). Statistics show that in the developed countries, 50 percent of all innovations and 95 percent of all radical innovations since World War II have come from new or smaller firms (Timmons, 1994). In 1996, SMEs in then fifteen-members-EU made 66% of the employment share, with six persons per enterprise in average (“European Foundation”, 2001).

In Japan of 1996, however, only 33% of the workers were employed by SMEs, with the average of ten persons per enterprise; nevertheless, argues the organisation, in the Japanese economy, SMEs play a way more crucial role than in any Western country. The Japanese “Keiretsu” system of groups-of-businesses, with network of cross-shareholding, makes these SMEs fall out of the definition above, on technical grounds.

The US is rated bellow the EU with regards to the SME employment: only 42% of the workforce is employed in SMEs (relative to EU’s 66%), but when comparing between the micro-enterprises, those with less than ten persons, the difference is wider, with 33% in EU and only 11% in the US.

Some of SME’s labour characteristics, as identified by “European Foundation” for the Japanese society, are extensive use of part-time employees, non unionised and non-regular employees (family aid, seasonal and daily-temporary), lower salaries and benefits and more annual working hours. In the US, on the other hand, the SME labour is characterised as more flexible, even when compared to the EU; this flexibility is a result of informal communication, direct supervision, more broadly defined jobs, and the ability to capitalise on strengths of individual employees to meet customer needs.

Other aspects of the SME sector will be discussed throughout the paper. However, the World Bank Group’s initiative for building better business environments at the developing world, highlights some of the difficulties specific to SMEs in these countries: difficult regulatory, tax and trade climate, barriers to entry, lack of legal infrastructure and corruption.

You can find and read the full version of the article, a 26-page PDF that includes the following topics:

SME’S OPERATIONS STRATEGY, SME’S QUALITY MANAGEMENT, FLEXIBLE PROCESS DESIGN OWNERSHIP, STEWARDSHIP, AND MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY AND FLEXIBILITY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR SME, SME AND SUPPLY CHAIN REFERENCES.

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Ezra Bar, MBA, PhD Student, is a Business Consutant and Academic Mentor for MBA and Engineering Students. Visit http://www.Ez-B-Process.Com/Resources.htm and find many other Academic and Business Articles. Visit http://www.Ez-B-Process.Com/PhD.htm for Academic Mentoring. Visit http://www.Ez-B-Process.Com/BPR.htm for Reengineering consulting.

In the latest bit of news from IBM, Big Blue tosses a bit of cold water on Sun in the wake of Sun’s non-news conference held jointly with Google yesterday. IBM announced a new lineup of servers running its Power5 chip architecture, and made certain to show where the new hardware exceeds similar offerings from Sun.

Aiming for the small and medium business market, those enterprises generally staffed with fewer than 1,000 employees, IBM has several versions of the new servers available. They will be available from one-way to eight-way configurations, one of which, the p5 550Q, will use a quad core module.

IBM lists a few different operating systems available in combination for the p5 systems: AIX 5L, Red Hat, or Novell SUSE. Using its Director 5.10 software for virtualization, operating systems can operate independently or simultaneously through logical platforms.

With multiple processing threads available from dual or quad core systems, IBM sees its new machines as being suited for databases or other high-demand applications. IBM said in the release its p5 550 is the fastest 4-way Java business and web application server.

IBM also disclosed its Power5+ systems. These are machines aimed at enterprises requiring heavy calculation and supercomputing application support. IBM touts a sustained 87.3 Gflop/s performance for a p5 575 cluster node. And, IBM tosses another shot at Sun in discussing a Power5+ workstation: “The IntelliStation POWER 285 offers more than twice the performance of the Sun Blade 2500″

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

In this appendix, we’ll tell you how to set up SMB file and printer shares, enable client user access, and monitor activity. Our specific focus is on Mac OS X Server 10.2.

Setup Procedures

The first thing to note is that the procedure described in Chapter 2 using System Preferences to enable Samba does not apply to Mac OS X Server. Unlike Mac OS X, the Sharing pane of System Preferences does not include an option to turn on Windows File Sharing. Instead, there is a set of applications to configure, activate, and monitor services: Workgroup Manager, Server Settings, Server Status, and Open Directory Assistant, all located in the directory /Applications/Utilities.

TIP: In addition to being installed with Mac OS X Server, these and other administrative applications are included on a separate installation CD-ROM sold with the operating system. They can be used to manage Mac OS X Server systems remotely from any Mac OS X machine.

For more information, refer to the Mac OS X Server Administrator’s Guide, included as a PDF file in the /Library/Documentation/MacOSXServerdirectory, and also downloadable from Apple Computer’s web site at http://www.apple.com/server/.

Briefly, the procedure for setting up SMB file and printer shares is as follows:

1. Designate share points in Workgroup Manager for file sharing.
2. Set up print queues in Server Settings for printer sharing, and activate Printer Service.
3. Configure and activate Windows Services in Server Settings.
4. Activate Password Server and enable SMB authentication in Open Directory Assistant.
5. Enable Password Server authentication for user accounts in Workgroup Manager.
6. Monitor file and print services with Server Status.

Sharing Files

The first step to enable SMB file sharing is to designate one or more share points. Share points are folders that form the root of shared volumes for any of the protocols supported by Mac OS X Server: Apple Filesharing Protocol (AFP), Network Filesystem (NFS), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and SMB.

To designate a share point, launch Workgroup Manager. You will be prompted for the local or remote server’s hostname or IP address, as well as for a username and password; this process is required by all the Mac OS X Server administrative applications. Once Workgroup Manager is open, click the Sharing button in the toolbar. The list on the left, under the Share Points tab, displays currently defined share points. To add a new one, click the All tab, and navigate to the folder you want to share.

On the right, under the General tab, check the box labeled Share this item and its contents, change the ownership and permissions if desired, then click the Save button. Next, under the Protocols tab, select Windows File Settings from the pop-up menu, and ensure that the box labeled Share this item using SMB is checked. At this point, you can also decide whether to allow guest access to the share, change the name of the share displayed to SMB clients, or set permissions for files and folders created by SMB clients. Click the Save button when you’re finished making changes. See Figure F-1.

Figure F-1. Workgroup Manager: Share Points and Windows File Settings

Sharing Printers

Printer shares are set up differently. First, launch Server Settings; under the File & Print tab, select Print, then Configure Print Service…. Check the box labeled Automatically share new queues for Windows printing. Next, click the Print icon again and then Show Print Monitor. Make sure the printers you want to share are listed. Printers directly attached to the server should have queues created automatically, but remote printers you wish to reshare must be added by clicking New Queue and discovering or specifying the printers. When you’re finished, click Save, select the Print icon one more time, and select Start Print Service. See Figure F-2.

Figure F-2. Server Settings: Print Service

TIP: Server Settings will make local printers available for sharing only if they’re PostScript compatible. Unfortunately, many printers, including consumer-grade USB inkjet printers, aren’t. If you want to make one of these printers available to SMB clients, you can still add the share to /etc/smb.conf yourself with a text editor. See “Rolling Your Own” later in this chapter for instructions and caveats related to making manual changes to smb.conf.

Configuring and Activating Services

At this point, neither the file shares nor the printer shares are available to SMB clients. To activate them, click the Windows icon in Server Settings, and click Configure Windows Services…. Under the General tab, you can set the server’s NetBIOS hostname, the workgroup or Windows NT domain in which the server resides, and the description that gets displayed in a browse list. You can also specify the code page for an alternate character set. Finally, you can enable boot-time startup of Samba. See Figure F-3.

Figure F-3. Server Settings: Windows Services

The Windows Services Access tab offers options to enable guest access and limit the number of simultaneous client connections; under the Logging tab, you can specify the verbosity of your logging. With options under the Neighborhood tab, you can configure your machine as a WINS client or server or have it provide browser services locally or across subnets.

When you’ve finished configuring Windows Services, click the Save button, then click the Windows icon in Server Settings, and select Start Windows Services. This starts the Samba daemons, enabling access from SMB clients.

Activating Password Server

Now that you’ve set up file and printer shares, you need to make sure users can properly authenticate to access them. In Mac OS X Server, this is accomplished with the Open Directory Password Server, a service based on the Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) standard and usable with many different authentication protocols, including the LAN Manager and Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM) protocols. This section describes how to support SMB client authentication, but for more information on what Password Server does and how it works, see the Mac OS X Server Administrator’s Guide.

To enable Password Server or merely check its settings, start the Open Directory Assistant. Unless you wish to change any of the settings, just click the right arrow button in the lower-right corner of the window until you get to the first Security step. At this point, activate Password Server by selecting the option marked Password and authentication information will be provided to other systems. The next step displays the main administrative account, and the one after that gives you a choice of authentication protocols to enable (see Figure F-4). Make sure that SMB-NT is checked, and check SMB-Lan Manager if you have Windows 95/98/Me or older clients. The final step saves the Password Server configuration and prompts you to reboot.

Figure F-4. Password Server authentication protocols

Enabling Password Server

To enable the use of Password Server for a user account, launch Workgroup Manager, and click the Accounts button in the toolbar. Under the Users tab on the far left (with the silhouette of a single person), select the account, and under the Advanced tab on the right, select Password Server for the User Password Type (see Figure F-5). You are prompted to enter a new user password to be stored in the Password Server database. After saving the account configuration, the user can authenticate and access shares from an SMB client.

Figure F-5. Workgroup Manager: Enabling Password Server authentication

Monitoring Services

Once you’ve got everything working, you’ll want to keep an eye on things. The Server Status application gives you views into the various services provided by Mac OS X Server. For Windows Services, you can see the current state of the service, browse the logs (located in the directory /Library/Logs/WindowsServices), display and terminate individual connections, and view a graph of connections over time (see Figure F-6). Similar information is provided for Print Service.

Figure F-6. Server Status: Windows Services

Configuration Details

Underneath the GUI, a lot of activity takes place to offer Windows Services. In the non-Server version of Mac OS X, selecting Windows File Sharing sets the SMBSERVER parameter in /etc/hostconfig and triggers the Samba startup item. In Mac OS X Server, under normal circumstances the Samba startup item and the SMBSERVER parameter are never used.

Instead, a process named sambadmind generates /etc/smb.conffrom the configuration specified in Server Settings and Workgroup Manager and handles starting and restarting the Samba daemons as necessary. The sambadmind process is in turn monitored by watchdog, which keeps an eye on certain processes and restarts those which fail. The watchdog utility is configured in /etc/watchdog.conf, a file similar to a System V inittab, which specifies how the services under watchdog’s purview are to be treated. For example, the line for sambadmind looks like this:

sambadmin:respawn:/usr/sbin/sambadmind -d # SMB Admin daemon

Using a watchdog-monitored process such as sambadmind to start the Samba daemons, instead of a one-time execution of a startup item, results in more reliable service. In Mac OS X Server, if a Samba daemon dies unexpectedly, it is quickly restarted. (Examples of other services monitored by watchdog are Password Server, Print Service, and the Server Settings daemon that allows remote management.)

There’s another wrinkle in Mac OS X Server: the Samba configuration settings are not written directly to /etc/smb.conf, as they are in the non-Server version of Mac OS X. Instead, they’re stored in the server’s local Open Directory domain, [1] from which sambadmind retrieves them and regenerates smb.conf. For example, the Samba global parameters are stored in /config/SMBServer (see Figure F-7). Share point information is also kept in Open Directory, under /config/SharePoints, while CUPS takes responsibility for printer configuration in /etc/cups/printers.conf (also creating stub entries used by Samba in /etc/printcap).

Figure F-7. NetInfo Manager: SMBServer properties

Table F-1 summarizes the association of Windows Services settings in the Server Settings application, properties stored in Open Directory, and parameters in /etc/smb.conf.

Table F-1: Samba configuration settings in Mac OS X Server

Rolling Your Own

When making manual changes to the Samba configuration file, take care to block changes initiated from graphical applications by invoking this command:

# chflags uchg /etc/smb.conf

From that point on, the GUI will be useful only for starting, stopping, and monitoring the service–not for configuring it.

If you install your own version of Samba, you can still manage it from Server Settings by changing some of the Open Directory properties in /config/SMBServer.

To do this, open NetInfo Manager and modify the samba_sbindir and samba_bindir properties to match the location of your Samba installation. Optionally, you can modify samba_libdir, samba_vardir, and samba_lockdir. Assuming a default Samba installation, you can also change these at the command line with the following commands:

# nicl . -create /config/SMBServer samba_sbindir /usr/local/samba/bin
# nicl . -create /config/SMBServer samba_bindir /usr/local/samba/bin
# nicl . -create /config/SMBServer samba_libdir /usr/local/samba/lib
# nicl . -create /config/SMBServer samba_vardir /usr/local/samba/var
# nicl . -create /config/SMBServer samba_lockdir /usr/local/samba/var/locks

You can check your settings with this command:

# nicl . -read /config/SMBServer

In Server Settings, select Stop Windows Services, then run this command:

# killall sambadmind

The watchdog utility restarts sambadmind within seconds. Finally, go back to Server Settings, and select Start Windows Services.

If you don’t modify Open Directory properties to match your active Samba installation (because you wish to manage your configuration another way), be sure never to activate Windows Services from the Server Settings application, or you’ll wind up with two sets of Samba daemons running concurrently.

1. In versions of Mac OS X prior to 10.2, Open Directory domains were called NetInfo domains. NetInfo Manager (located in /Applications/Utilities) provides a graphical interface to view and modify the contents of Open Directory databases. For more information, see the Mac OS X Server Administrator’s Guide, as well as Understanding and Using NetInfo, downloadable from the Mac OS X Server resources web page at http://www.apple.com/server/resources.html.

Note: Leon Towns-von Stauber contributed the material in this excerpt on “Running Samba on the Mac OS X Server” for Appendix F of Using Samba, 2nd Edition.

Originally appeared at ONLamp.com (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/excerpt/samba_appendix/index.html)

Using Samba, Second Edition – Using Samba, Second Edition is a comprehensive guide to Samba administration. This new edition covers all versions of Samba from 2.0 to 2.2, including selected features from an alpha version of 3.0, as well as the SWAT graphical configuration tool. Updated for Windows 2000, ME, and XP, the book also explores Samba’s new role as a primary domain controller and domain member server, its support for the use of Windows NT/2000/XP authentication and filesystem security on the host Unix system, and accessing shared files and printers from Unix clients.