Hello all,

I'm pleased so far with the latest Kubuntu (7.10) setup, and am trying to integrate it with the machines running That Other OS in our den. Samba was installed by apt-get, and I have a share off my home dir that's configured thus (through System Settings/Sharing/File Sharing/Advanced Samba Settings):

Unspecified users: allow
Specified user: root, allow writable access
No guest accounts: (looks like system users, anyway)

Trouble is, when I try to navigate to it on the other machines, I see Mshome (the samba network), then josquin (machine name), and it asks for a password. Mine doesn't work, the root password doesn't work, and I'm stuck.

One troubling thing is that clicking on System | Samba from KMenu does absolutely nothing. Perhaps a samba-config package isn't installed?

I think I do have SWAT, but I also have XAMPP installed, so my Apache server isn't where it normally is. Does that affect SWAT?

Any help for a person who shouldn't be a newbie by now, but still is.....

Thanks

Jim Stanley

Sorry, there is no short answer.

Samba is incredibly hard to learn and configure, when you are new to it. It is one of the harder linux apps to master. Know the /etc/samba/smb.conf file.

User accounts can be very tricky, and there are many ways to do them, depending on how you store the user accounts. You not only have to create the samba user, you have to link it to a linux user, and make sure all permissions are inplace and correct, then lastly make sure smb.conf file grants them the right permissions.

I would have *thought* apt-get install samba would have prompted for the samba root password, but I may be mistaken. However, you will not be connecting to the samba server using the samba root account. You have to create user accounts for samba.

One of the more popular and easier ways to create accounts is to install the smbldap-tools package, and configure it. It's not easy, but when configured, is the easiest way by far to add users. Google for smbldap-tools howto, should be some for ubuntu or debian.

You can always do it manually... I'm looking for URL's... here's one:
http://www.brennan.id.au/18-Samba.html

Forget about SWAT, it's worthless, as are most tools. You have to know how to do things manually before any of the so called tools will be of any help.

I'd suggest goggling for a 'samba howto' for either ubuntu or debian. There are lots of them out there.

Also check the ubuntu forums for howtos.

The samba site has some excellent documents on it. I know, you shouldn't have to read multiple 1000 page documents to get an answer, but believe me, the further you dive into samba, the more you will need to read.

You probably need to add passwords to the smbpasswd file. The command to use is "smbpasswd -a <username>". It will look like this:

[machine:~]:smbpasswd -a jstanley
New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:

This will only work if "jstanley" already exists as a normal user on the machine. You can also use "smbpasswd -a root", and that will always work. Since you are only allowing write access to root, that may be all you need.

Hi,
just spent the best part of 3 days going through this myself on Slacky 11 and as mentioned the only real way to know what is going on for sure is to do it manually.

Some things to do and check.

As David1357 says make sure you create the passwords as he shows, the users must exist on the machine running Samba or it will refuse to create a pw with that user name.

You can check for your samba password file as ROOT, it will not be readable by anyone else..
Look in /etc/samba/private/ for smbpasswd & passdb.tdb, or similar.

If that does not help paste the contents of smb.conf here and I will do my best to help. Should be at /etc/samba/smb.conf or can find it with 'slocate smb.conf' (again you may need to be root).

Oh and if you can it would be really helpful if you can edit out all commented out stuff you don't need, copy it first though :-)

BashTin.

testparm > output.txt

Post the txt file here