How do I completely remove and reinstall Samba on Debian?

Question

My Samba installation has become a mess, and now the services won't even start correctly anymore, for some reason.

Is there a way to completely remove Samba, as if it was never there, and then reinstall it so I can have a fresh setup?

Solution 1

sudo apt-get purge samba

will remove the entire package, along with configuration files, which apt-get remove samba won't. After the purge, reinstall samba using

sudo apt-get install samba

from man apt-get:

purge
    purge is identical to remove except that packages are removed and
    purged (any configuration files are deleted too).

Solution 2

On Ubuntu (17) I did

apt purge samba samba-common

followed by

apt install system-config-samba

which worked for me.

Comments

[Jane Panda]

Well it looks like that sort of worked, but now it seems to have hung on "Starting Samba daemons: nmbd smbd". I didn't see any errors before that, but to be fair it went by fairly quick, heh.

[Pylsa]

@Bob you may need a reboot

[Jane Panda]

Awesome, that did the trick! I guess sometimes rebooting -does- work on *nixy stuff. Thanks!

[Pylsa]

@Bob Great it worked for you! Good luck with your fresh samba install! Haha! ;)

[Antônio Medeiros]

Debian 9.0 does not have a package called system-config-samba. But the hint of the package samba-common saved my day! So what I did was (as root) apt purge samba samba-common, apt --purge autoremove and finally apt-get install samba.

[Sanjok Gurung]

This worked for me in Ubuntu 14.04