That’s right: services, plural. Nominally, there are two; actually, there are three or more.
First, there is smbd (the smb daemon). It relies on the Server Message block protocol, which runs over NetBIOS.
Second, there is nmbd (the NetBios daemon). It supplies Lan Manager (LM) services over NetBIOS.
Third, there is the lisa daemon. It is a service that runs over TCP/IP, rather than NetBIOS. It drastically simplifies the display of subnet hosts via Network Neighborhood/My Network Places Windows folders.
Fourth, you may choose to run SWAT, which runs as its own service. We’ll discuss this in section 9 of this unit.
Note the several ways you can start a service.
There is the service command:
service smb start
Note that the service is not called “samba.” This command will start both smbd and nmbd.
Or, to permanently start smb and nmbd in runlevels 3, 4 and 5, command:
chkconfig smb on
This will write information to your runtime control daemon scripts (in /etc/rc.d).
Or, for a GUI interface, command:
serviceconf &
or open this via the GUI menu. Don’t forget that in the GUI, you will need to start the service in both runlevel 3 and runlevel 5.
If you use either of the latter two methods, you will still need to manually start the services for this session.
To start and restart the bulk of networking services in one shot, command:
service xinetd restart