Trying to get Samba 4.x running on AIX 7.1?

Hello,

I have an AIX 7.1 Power8 machine on which I have a working copy of Samba 3.6 installed using perzl.org repo.

The issue I am running into is, Samba 3.6 supports the more secure SMB2 protocol but its tools (smbclient) do not, only in 4.1 did Samba add support for SMB2 to their utilities.

As per their official docs:

�Protocol support for SMB2 was experimentally introduced with Samba 3.5 server and went production with Samba 3.6. Note that smbclient did not receive SMB2 until the 4.1 release.�

So I have two options:

a) Remove Samba 3.6 and install latest RPM/YUM from IBM (lots of dependency issues unless I completely clear out perzl.org packages) and then use YUM to pull latest Samba-4.6.4 - seems very complicated and a lot of changes bringing in RPM/YUM.

b) Install samba-client-4.6.7-1.aix6.1.ppc.rpm from the official IBM Open Source Software repo and mix that with Samba 3.6

I started down the (a) option but I am running into a lot of dependency issues getting YUM to install so it got me thinking about (b) plan.

If I got Samba 4.6 or just a subset of Samba to get latest smbclient utility installed on my 2nd AIX box (testing box), can I copy the newer smbclient utility to my production AIX box that is running Samba 3.6 and use it? Or will that not work. Is there anyway to make this work?

You can break some existing production applications if you have to change a lot of libraries.

It may work, but you really have to test every production app on your upgraded non-prod box. In an analogous upgrade of samba on solaris 11, we setup an intermediate linux box as fileserver that could serve both PC's and the solaris box. That way we did not have to change a Solaris system with the company's entire billing, AR, and CIS application.
suite. We did not have months for testing.