Installed sernet samba 4, then settled on 3.6 on RHEL 6.4. When I do "service smb start", RHEL indicates "OK", but the process fails immediately, not showing up in "ps -aef | grep smb". A "service smb restart", returns "FAILED" for shutdown and "OK" for the start but still fails to start smb. It leaves a /var/lock/smbd.pid and a /var/lock/subsys/smb Deleting those files and restarting smb still fails while indicating "OK". Increased log level to 10 in smb.conf. Relevant error from /var/log/samba/log.smbd [2013/12/10 04:41:30.406097, 1] registry/reg_backend_db.c:543(regdb_init) regdb_init: unknown registry version 3 (code version = 2), refusing initialization [2013/12/10 04:41:30.406150, 0] registry/reg_init_basic.c:36(registry_init_common) Failed to initialize the registry: WERR_CAN_NOT_COMPLETE [2013/12/10 04:41:30.406301, 10] registry/reg_backend_db.c:619(regdb_close) regdb_close: decrementing refcount (1->0) Installed samba 3.6 on an identical server (these are nodes in an Oracle RAC cluster) without installing sernet or other versions, and that server does not have these problems. Could be related to https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8527
Also performed: # net registry check Failed to initialize the registry: WERR_CAN_NOT_COMPLETE
Samba supports transparent upgrades of data structures but not downgrades. Remove the registry.tdb and you should be fine.
Samba doesn't support downgrades of tdb files!