Debian 9: "Unit samba.service is masked"

[peter_b]

[PROBLEM]
Trying to start samba service on Debian 9 (Stretch) with systemctl:

Code: Select all

$ systemctl start samba

Returns this error message:

Failed to start samba.service: Unit samba.service is masked.

Systemctl status gives me:

● samba.service
Loaded: masked (/dev/null; bad)
Active: inactive (dead)

[SOLUTION]
I always fall into this trap on Debian systems!
You can start the services as "smbd" and "nmbd" - not "samba".

Listing the services in "/lib/systemd/system" shows that "samba.service" is grounded to nowhere:

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lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   9 Jan 31 23:12 /lib/systemd/system/samba.service -> /dev/null
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 385 Jan 31 23:12 /lib/systemd/system/nmbd.service
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 397 Jan 31 23:12 /lib/systemd/system/smbd.service

Actually, I assume(d) that "samba" service was a nice convenient wrapper to handle smbd/nmbd in one.
I don't know why they've disabled it by default now...

Links:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=126076
https://askubuntu.com/questions/754572/ ... -is-masked
http://aptosid.com/index.php?name=PNphp ... pic&t=2846