I just spent an entire morning trying to get samba's swat interface to
work. I checked all the newsgroups, google, samba doc, etc. Hopefully,
this will save someone else 4 hours!

Getting SWAT to work on Gentoo!

Gentoo's samba installation installs swat in a disabled state by default
and per policy. To enable swat, the user must turn off disable in the file

/etc/xinet.d/swat as so:

service swat
{
port = 901
socket_type = stream
wait = no
only_from = localhost
user = root
server = /usr/sbin/swat
log_on_failure += USERID
# MAKE DISABLE = NO!
disable = no
}

Next, and this is what caused me such angst, is to check that the module
xinetd is installed!

emerge -s xinetd

If NOT, install it

emerge xinetd

For some reason, and I'm reporting this as a possible bug to the
maintainers, since it should be a requirement.

Lastly, add the xinetd startup script to the system default

rc-update add xinetd default

After that, swat pops right up.

http://localhost:901