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Samba: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1

Submitted by Druss on Tue, 2009-06-23 04:27

I made a mistake earlier today when looking for a GUI application to manage samba shares. I installed the wrong application - gadmin-samba (which is quite fugly and buggy) - instead of system-config-samba which is clean and has worked well for me in the past. gadmin-samba added all sorts of nonsense and in a bid to reset the samba configuration, I nuked the files in /etc/samba to give system-config-samba something of a fresh slate.

However, once installed, system-config-samba just failed to start. I thought that perhaps it didn't like the fact that the smb.conf was missing (which proved to be right... rather idiotic thing to fail on with no decent error message). So, I nuked samba altogether using apt and reinstalled it. Rather, I tried to reinstall it. apt/dpkg spat the following error at me during the configuration:

Generating /etc/default/samba...                                                                                                                                                   
* Starting Samba daemons                                                                                                                                                    [fail]
invoke-rc.d: initscript samba, action "start" failed.                                                                                                                              
dpkg: error processing samba (--configure):                                                                                                                                        
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1                                                                                                                  
Errors were encountered while processing:                                                                                                                                          
samba                                                                                                                                                                             
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

A full remove and purge failed to fix it, which was rather frustrating. So, in a last ditch attempt, I created a blank smb.conf in /etc/samba and then purged and reinstalled samba. It went off without a hitch and system-config-samba also works fine now.

It's rather silly, if you ask me, to have the entire reinstallation die a cryptic death because of a missing configuration file.

Comments

Hey, thanks for that info. Heh. I did the same thing you did.

Thanks from me too. I deleted the config-file before the reinstallation just to make sure that I am getting a new one.
Recreating an empty one at least let me reinstall samba - but I did not get a new config file.

I had similar problem, solved it with uninstalling samba and samba-common first, then installing it again.. I got the smb.conf from the package maintainer as well.