Satyajit Ranjeev

I had set up a CentOS server last year, if you remember with a RAID setup. Things had been going on very well for more than a year and a half. A few weeks back one of the hard disks issue warning that it had bad sectors and needed replacement. Thus we bought a new hard disk and replaced it. And thankfully to the RAID system I did not have to get it offline. 

After the replacement of the HDD I had a strange problem today. The samba service I had setup suddenly failed. The Samba server would just not start. I tried restarting it and trying all tricks but just in vain. Then I logged into freenode #samba and asked for help. And thankfully one of them was able to direct me to solving the issue.

The problem I had was when I tried starting samba using service smb start the command would just hang there. After looking through the strace smbd -i command he was able to tell me that the problem was due to the cups service. It had not been started, strangely.

Any ways that led me to update my samba to 3.5 from 3.1. So if you guys face similar issue try checking the cups service.