Samba

[notdrugged]

Is a tough animal under Arch Linux. But probably only because I am a Samba newbie. What are some of the more common mistakes made by Samba newbies? Anyone give me a hand? Sometimes seen by my Vista machine, but can't see files, Vista says something not set up properly.

[MrNovi]

I'm a long way from being a Linux or Samba guru, but I had to learn how to get it running for my Folding rigs. This is how I did it in Ubuntu/Kubuntu and had no problems connecting my Linux boxes to my Windows 2000 and XP boxes. I don't know if Vista would be any different as I've avoided Vista like the plague. Maybe something there will help you. If not, some of the Linux gurus here will be glad to assist you.

1: Make sure that Samba is installed on the Linux box. If not use Adept to install it.
2: Go to Places/Home/
3: Right click on the folding folder and select share
4: Select Share over Windows Network
5: Open a terminal window
6: Type sudo smbpasswd -a user name (replace user name with the name you use to log into your linux box)
7: enter your Linux password
8: enter a new Samba password
9: re-enter the above password to verify
10: reboot the system (may not be necessary, but it doesn't hurt)
11: From your Windows box use Windows Explorer to go to the share.
12: Enter the Linux user name and the new password you created when prompted.
13: Sacrifice two small goats and a White rabbit (again, may not be necessary but it can't hurt and you can then fix a nice dinner).

[Ned Slider]

Is a tough animal under Arch Linux. But probably only because I am a Samba newbie. What are some of the more common mistakes made by Samba newbies? Anyone give me a hand? Sometimes seen by my Vista machine, but can't see files, Vista says something not set up properly.

If you can manually connect to the IP, but not browse by name, then I believe the equivalent of the old Browser service is not enabled by default on Vista. Try turning it on (if it's disabled) - it's called something like network discovery service now or something like that, and see if that helps. I found it useful to manually open the share (run > \\ip_address\share_name) and then bookmark it's location, or you could map it as a network drive.

Common mistakes, and good practices to avoid disappointment:

Using the same usernames/passwords on Windows and Linux helps simplify matters, although it's not strictly necessary.

Pay attention to firewall settings on both host and client (ports 137-139 and 445). SMB doesn't follow the normal client/server relationship in that a client makes a request to a server. The server advertises it's presence and the client listens for that, so the client needs to be configured to accept unsolicited incoming packets.

Samba uses two levels of access control. The first is samba - setting up the share and giving samba users the appropriate permissions to access (read/write) the share. The second is Linux file permissions on the shared folder. Even if you've given Joe access to the share as a samba user, if the Linux file permissions don't allow the Linux user Joe access to the shared folder then Joe is going nowhere.

Some GUI Samba config tools on some distro's are buggy and don't always work correctly (like creating samba users on RHEL for example). For guaranteed success, get to know the samba config file and edit it by hand and/or use the CLI tools (depends on your distro and the tools provided).

[notdrugged]

Hey guys Thanks for the awesome replies. Gonna try again this weekend in the hopes of getting things working. It will make things much easier on us. My wife sometimes uses the Linux computer for school, and it would make file transfer and printing easier if we could get the computers speaking to each other finally. Thanks again. But yeah, it's not an IP problem, as the Vista computer often acknowledges the Linux computer by discovering it. It just eventually deletes the discovery since there's a "problem" with it. I set up both computers to have their own IP address so both could access the internet simultaneously.

[Ned Slider]

np - if you get stuck, post the contents of your samba config file (often at /etc/samba/smb.conf) and we'll tweak it by hand

But check the permissions first on your shares - both Linux file permissions and the samba share permissions.