I know this has been covered but I can't find an answer anywhere. Samba seems to be working fine. . . . except: I can mount the shares on my Windows server but only read only. I don't think the problem is with my win box because I can read/write from all my windows boxes. I also can't connect to the printer on another workstation that I can use from other windows boxes.

Any ideas. I had this problem about a year ago on another linux box and I thought I had to change the I mounted the share, but I've fiddled with everything and can't get it to mount rw.

What commands are you using to mount?

I have to admit that I used Mandrake's graphical utility to mount the share.

This is the line from fstab:

//server/Server /mnt/Server smbfs credentials=/etc/samba/auth.server.hosi\pat 0 0

I add it to the fstab file in a way that lets anyone mount it, but you do have to specify which account to mount if from as they will be the owner. Example using jsmith ( uid=501 )
and using an account called jsmith on the WIndows box as credentials to connect to the share.

//hostname/sharename /mnt/samba smbfs gid=501,username=jsmith,password=letmein,user,rw,noauto 0 0

this will let anyone ( the 'user' switch ) mount the share //hostname/sharename onto /mnt/samba with read/write permissions ( 'rw' ) but it will not mount automatically ( noauto ). Along with this entry you can add this line to /etc/rc.local ->
mount /mnt/samba

So it will mount on boot, but not until after the network services ( like the network card!!!) have been started, since they start before rc.local is run.

The syntax for the share name may not be familiar to you, so I will show you what it would look like to connect to ( using Windows UNC syntax ) share c$ on \\windowsbox ->
//windowsbox/c\$ (notice the forward slash before the $ sign, that is necessary because the $ has special meaning in Unix/Linux .

Hopefully this made sense to you.

Thanks for the info. I will try it when I get home. And let you know how it works out.

Here are the two entries in /etc/fstab:

//server/Server /mnt/Server smbfs gid=501,username=pat,password=******,user,rw,noauto 0 0
//server/Server /home/pat/server smbfs gid=501,username=pat,password=******,user,rw,noauto 0 0

I also edited rc.local to mount these two at boot.

Here's what I have. If I cd to the server from the command line, I can create and edit files. If I surf there with Nautilus or try to save a file there from Write, it comes up read only. Strange!