I have Samba set up currently and can access both the share (500Gb external usb drive) and the shared printer (some cheap pos, but works). I am running PCLinuxOS with LXDE and now that everything is setup and working would like to boot only into console to save memory (1Gb installed on this machine, 2Ghz P4 processor). I edited inittab to boot into runlevel 3 and rebooted the box. No problems with accessing the printer or, I guess even ACCESSING the share, the key word being accessing. I'm connecting to the share from my laptop running XP Pro SP3 (keep in mind, worked fine when booted into LXDE) but when I rebooted only into console, it is asking for my username/password to access the share. I enter and no go. Giving me errors along the lines of system error 53, 85, or 67. All of which seem to be authentication related. I have matching usernames/passwords setup on both machines (actually all the machines in the house) but for some reason it doesn't seem to like my answer. I've tried this both with mapping a drive from My Computer and using 'net use' via command prompt. Any insight as to why this would work when I boot into the GUI and not when booted into console only would be greatly appreciated. I can post my smb.conf file if needed. Thanks in advance.

Hi

Did you add a user to the Samba users database ?
If not, run as root to add your XP username and its password
Then you will use this credentials to connect to your Samba server from your XP box.

Cheers

yes, I've added my xp username using smbpasswd (all usernames are the same across all 4 machines, windows and Linux). Also, I have no issues using the shared directory when I boot to runlevel 5 using LXDE. The problem only arises when trying to boot to runlevel 3, and not use the graphical desktop environment. I get the error "Z: is not accessible. The network name cannot be found", where Z: is the drive letter I have the samba share mapped to in XP.

turns out the only reason I couldnt access this share is that a gui tool was auto mounting the external drive when I booted into runlevel 5. All I needed to do was add an appropriate entry into fstab for the usb hard drive and voila! all is good. Now I'm just waiting for the 2GB memory upgrade I ordered for this box