Install Samba 4(.0.4) on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, from source

At the office we've been running Samba 4 for quite a while already. However, the version(s) in use date back to what was found in Ubuntu releases available at install time. The Samba team has actually done a great job at releasing a stable version for Samba 4, but I haven't seen anyone offering prebuilt packages for Ubuntu.

Recently I have been wondering if it would be a good idea to build Samba 4 from source instead. I don't like this approach much, because I prefer having all packages handled by the package manager. Then again, /usr/local/ doesn't need to stay empty, and my domain controllers are just that; domain controllers.

So yesterday I did my first attempt at building Samba from source, which went so well that I did it again today, on a fresh new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS install. I actually switched it to the IP of the primary DC as well, and stopped the old primary DC because the new one was working without any issues at all.

Now onto the actual instructions (assumes a clean 12.04 LTS basic Ubuntu server install):

$ mkdir src
$ cd src

$ wget http://ftp.samba.org/pub/samba/samba-4.0.4.tar.gz
$ tar xf samba-4.0.4.tar.gz
$ cd samba-4.0.4

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config libkrb5-dev libacl1-dev \
libattr1-dev python2.7-dev libpam0g-dev libldap2-dev

$ ./configure && make

$ sudo make install

I've omitted all of the output, since the process was so easy. The description is easy as well:

1. Make a directory to store the samba source in
2. Download the Samba 4.0.4 source file
3. Extract it
4. Install build utilities, Samba dependencies
5. Configure and build Samba
6. Install Samba into /usr/local/samba

After these steps you can either follow the Samba 4 documentation to provision a new domain or join a domain, or copy the necessary files from your old domain controller onto this one if you're replacing your domain controller.

There is one important final step, and that's to create an init file. On the Samba 4 InitScript page there's a script listed that will work just fine, I copied it here for reference:

description "SMB/CIFS File and Active Directory Server"
author      "Jelmer Vernooij "
start on (local-filesystems and net-device-up)
stop on runlevel [!2345]
expect fork
normal exit 0
pre-start script
 [ -r /etc/default/samba4 ] && . /etc/default/samba4
 install -o root -g root -m 755 -d /var/run/samba
 install -o root -g root -m 755 -d /var/log/samba
end script
exec /usr/local/samba/sbin/samba -D

Copy this file to /etc/init/samba4.conf and you can use service samba4 start to start Samba 4.

All of these steps will probably apply to Ubuntu 12.10 as well, but I haven't verified yet. Also, since Samba 4 doesn't require anything that's not in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, it might be wise to stick to this release until another LTS is released.

Please share any thoughts using the comments!