im in the process of making a windoes file server at school, not for a class, but because we can, me and my comp teacher are doing it for one of the comp labs, anyways i was wondering which version or redhat would work best to do that with, i mean i know it wont be too big of difference, but maybe what you people perfer to run, i have access to 7.1 7.3 and 8.0 and i could download others if needed, but i was just curious!

You will need Samba. It is a server / client program capable of communicating over a network using microsoft networking.

The distro or version of the distro make no difference. You just need to get the latest stable version of Samba and install it on your system.

All of the versions of RedHat come with samba and you can get the latest rpm updates to samba from ftp.redhat.com, rpmfind.net, or samba.org. rpmfind.net will have the latest update for your specific version. I would recommend using RedHat up2date if you have internet access.

Just install RedHat and make sure you install samba and samba-swat

Setup networking if you didn't during setup...
(very short version)

If you have a dhcp server on your network run this...

dhcpcd eth0

If not decide what your file server ip address is and set it like this...

ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1

Test it by pinging another machine on the network

ping 192.168.0.97
PING 192.168.0.97 (192.168.0.97) from 192.168.0.1 : 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.0.97: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.137 ms

Cool!

Internet access?

Run up2date to register the machine, run up2date again and update up2date, then run up2date again and update everything else except the kernel files, then run it to update the kernel. Then reboot to use the new kernel.

If not just use what came with it.


User setup.. If you have gnome or kde installed there are windows tools for this. Here is the command line way to do it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Add your users and set passwords

useradd david
passwd david
smbpasswd david:david

useradd cletus
passwd cletus
smbpasswd cletus

Add some groups if you want to.
You can use them in many ways for share permissions
Many possibilities here. Depends on how you want to setup your network and how complex your shares are going to be.

examples

groupadd lanusers
groupadd teachers
groupadd students

Add users to groups

gpasswd -a david teachers
gpasswd -a david lanusers

gpasswd -a cletus lanusers
gpasswd -a cletus students


As an example you could setup shares that are accessable only by teachers, shares accessable by students and teachers, shares accessable by lanusers.

Anyone not in one of the groups could have a public share accessable by guests.


Configure Samba with swat
------------------------------------------------------------------

Backup the smb.conf file..

cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.bak

Then enable swat using setup > system services .. turn on samba (smb) and samba-swat (swat).
You could also enable swat (it's disabled by default) by editing /etc/xinetd.d/swat ...

disabled = no

The file also has the permission to access swat at 127.0.0.1 which is the local machine. You could add ipaddresses of machines that you want to access it from.

Then you can start swat by restarting xinetd ...

/etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd restart

Check to see if it's running if you want to with this command ...

netstat -a | grep swat

tcp 0 0 *:swat *:* LISTEN

This says swat is running, you can open a browser on a machine that you gave swat access.
On the server itself it will be ...

127.0.0.1:901


To access swat from another machine use the server ip. If it's setup using dhcp find it like this ...

ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:00
inet addr:192.168.0.1 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:7313018 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:8550830 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:2663896164 (2540.4 Mb) TX bytes:573016588 (546.4 Mb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0xa000

Enter it in a browser...

192.168.0.1:901

You will get a login prompt

Login as root with your root password.

If you login as another user on your file server you will not be able to setup the server, only view some stats.

Configure your server and your shares. You should not change things unless you know what they are. There are help messages for each setting. Just stick to the basics until you have it running.

Make sure Samba is setup to start ...

chkconfig --list smb
smb 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off


This says start samba in runlevel 3,4, and 5, and stop it in the others.

If it's off you could turn it on (done earlier if you used setup) with

chkconfig --level 345 smb on

You can control samba with this ...
/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb
Usage: /etc/rc.d/init.d/smb {start|stop|restart|reload|status|condrestart}

examples

/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb start

/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb stop

You will have the backup copy of the smb.conf file if you need to start over just copy it back in the place of the one that swat changed. Once you have some success with it make another backup of the smb.conf file.

Look in the smb.conf file to see what you are actually using.


You will need to restart samba each time you change the config file for changes to take effect.

/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb restart

Or use swat to restart it.


Start using the file server


Good Luck!!

Man that was one hell of a reply. Kudos.

L8rz