Check an smb.conf configuration file for internal correctness
testparm [-s|--suppress-prompt] [--help] [-v|--verbose] {config filename} [hostname hostIP]
This tool is part of the samba(7) suite.
testparm is a very simple test program to check an smbd(8) configuration file for internal correctness. If this program reports no problems, you can use the configuration file with confidence that smbd will successfully load the configuration file.
Note that this is NOT a guarantee that the services specified in the configuration file will be available or will operate as expected.
If the optional host name and host IP address are specified on the command line, this test program will run through the service entries reporting whether the specified host has access to each service.
If testparm finds an error in the smb.conf file it returns an exit code of 1 to the calling program, else it returns an exit code of 0. This allows shell scripts to test the output from testparm.
-s|--suppress-prompt
Without this option, testparm will prompt for a carriage return after printing the service names and before dumping the service definitions.
-V|--version
Prints the program version number.
--option=<name>=<value>
Set the smb.conf(5) option "<name>" to value "<value>" from the command line. This overrides compiled-in defaults and options read from the configuration file.
-?|--help
Print a summary of command line options.
--usage
Display brief usage message.
-d|--debuglevel=level
level is an integer from 0 to 10. The default value if this parameter is not specified is 1.
The higher this value, the more detail will be logged to the log files about the activities of the server. At level 0, only critical errors and serious warnings will be logged. Level 1 is a reasonable level for day-to-day running - it generates a small amount of information about operations carried out.
Levels above 1 will generate considerable amounts of log data, and should only be used when investigating a problem. Levels above 3 are designed for use only by developers and generate HUGE amounts of log data, most of which is extremely cryptic.
Note that specifying this parameter here will override the \m[blue]log level\m[] parameter in the smb.conf file.
-v|--verbose
If this option is specified, testparm will also output all options that were not used in smb.conf(5) and are thus set to their defaults.
--parameter-name parametername
Dumps the named parameter. If no section-name is set the view is limited by default to the global section. It is also possible to dump a parametrical option. Therefore the option has to be separated by a colon from the parametername.
--section-name sectionname
Dumps the named section.
--show-all-parameters
Show the parameters, type, possible values.
-l|--skip-logic-checks
Skip the global checks.
configfilename
This is the name of the configuration file to check. If this parameter is not present then the default smb.conf(5) file will be checked.
hostname
If this parameter and the following are specified, then testparm will examine the hosts allow and hosts deny parameters in the smb.conf(5) file to determine if the hostname with this IP address would be allowed access to the smbd server. If this parameter is supplied, the hostIP parameter must also be supplied.
hostIP
This is the IP address of the host specified in the previous parameter. This address must be supplied if the hostname parameter is supplied.
This is usually the name of the configuration file used by smbd(8).
The program will issue a message saying whether the configuration file loaded OK or not. This message may be preceded by errors and warnings if the file did not load. If the file was loaded OK, the program then dumps all known service details to stdout.
This man page is correct for version 3 of the Samba suite.
The original Samba software and related utilities were created by Andrew Tridgell. Samba is now developed by the Samba Team as an Open Source project similar to the way the Linux kernel is developed.
The original Samba man pages were written by Karl Auer. The man page sources were converted to YODL format (another excellent piece of Open Source software, available at ftp://ftp.icce.rug.nl/pub/unix/) and updated for the Samba 2.0 release by Jeremy Allison. The conversion to DocBook for Samba 2.2 was done by Gerald Carter. The conversion to DocBook XML 4.2 for Samba 3.0 was done by Alexander Bokovoy.