Stopping and Starting the Samba Daemons

Checking if the Samba Daemons are Running

Samba runs a couple of processes in the background: notably the Samba and NetBIOS daemons.

You can check to see if the Samba daemon (smbd) is running using the ps command:

$ ps -ef | grep smbd
root      3869     1  0 16:41 ?        00:00:00 smbd -F
root      3881  3869  0 16:41 ?        00:00:00 smbd -F
fredb     3944  3052  0 16:47 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto smbd
$

You can also check to see if the NetBIOS name server daemon (nmbd) is running using the ps command:

$ ps -ef | grep nmbd
root      1964     1  0 08:59 ?        00:00:00 nmbd -D
fredb     8076  4453  0 18:09 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto nmbd
$

If any process (-apart from the grep command itself) is returned, then the process is running.

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Stopping the Samba Daemons

If you need to stop the smbd or nmbd daemon, you can use the following commands:

$ sudo service smbd stop
$ sudo service nmbd stop

If you need to forcibly stop the smbd or nmbd daemon, you can use the following command (-you'll need to give them some time to shut down):

sudo kill -15 <smbd PID>
sudo kill -15 ><nmbd PID>

Note: only use sudo kill -9 as a last resort - as this may leave shared memory in an inconsistent state

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Starting the Samba Daemons

If you need to start the smbd or nmbd daemon, you can use the following commands:

$ sudo service smbd start
$ sudo service nmbd start

Note: there is also a restart option if you need to restart the daemon after changing the Samba configuration files!

from:  http://www.linuceum.com/Server/srvSambaDaemons.php