I have read about all I can read on the forum for the past 3 days and still no luck with mapping a drive to my XP Home PC from my RedHat 9.0 SAMBA server. I have NetBIOS installed on XP and can see the SAMBA server in 'my network places'. When I double click on it is asks for a user name and password and when i put it in and hit enter i get a login box with the hostname of the XP computer\username--BEFORE: sam, AFTER: xpcomp\sam. (??)

Here is my smb.conf file:

[global]
log file = /var/log/samba/%m.log
dns proxy = no
smb passwd file = /etc/samba/smbpasswd
server string = X: Drive
obey pam restrictions = yes
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
workgroup = WORKGROUP
hosts allow = 172.16.5. 127.
encrypt passwords = yes
security = user
max log size = 0

[backup]
comment = back your files up here
create mode = 775
preserve case = yes
guest ok = yes
read only = no
write list = sam, ann
path = /home/backup
directory mode = 775

Okay, here are the answers to the questions I see most commonly asked when a person has a problem with SAMBA:

YES = I have created SAMBA accounts for my users on the server
YES = the user name matches the SAMBA account
YES = there is no firewall setting on the XP pc
YES = i have an IPTABLES firewall but it allows everything to pass on the local LAN
YES = I can create shared directories on my XP pc and see them on the SAMBA server but not from SAMBA to XP Home

My questions are:

1. What command do I issue from the XP PC to map to the share on my SAMBA server? I have tried:

net use x: \\firewall\backup
and
net use x: \\ipaddress \backup

and it keeps prompting me for a password. I use the password of the account that matches the SAMBA account the same as the XP Home account and I get a 1326 'bad username or password error.'

2. Are there any settings in XP Home edition I have to make to get this to work? When I set up a shared folder on my XP computer i see it clearly on the SAMBA server. Is this the way this is supposed to work?

3. Does the [backup] bracket tell me what the share name is on the SAMBA server? what does this parameter do for me?

My eyes are dried up in the sockets ... any help will be appreciated.

TIA

Did you use smbpasswd to give your users a samba password? You have to do it even if both the system password and the samba-password are the same.

er...... what happens if somebody does not have smbpasswd? or some stuff off samba? where can he gets them? (me is the <someone>)

All these utils are part of samba. If you install from source you have it. If you install from your distro's binaries perhaps are in different packages.

I usually use Samba Swat to setup Samba users/passwords by pointing a browser (on the server) to
127.0.0.1:901

Questions:
1. I normally use something like \\SERVERNAME\PATH with no spaces in it.

2. XP is such a pain to me, I refuse to run it at all. All my win pcs (I have 4 at home counting the one I use for my tv) use Win2kPro and have no problems at all with networking with Linux pcs. Sorry I can't help more on xp.

3. The name in the bracket is the share name for the path specified. I only use about 3 shares on my server, the user's home directories for one, one called [Linux] for user's backup to an ext3 partition on the server, and a fat32 partition called [Data]. The last one isn't really necessary but I keep program installs seperated according to the OS they are meant for.

Thanks so much for all the help. I converted my passwd file but forgot to create smbpasswd's. Once that was taken care of it started working. One thing about XP though, if you do not disable the built in firewall it will not work.

Thanks again!