Passwordless File Sharing for Windows Clients - How can i do ?
 

I am running Red Hat 9 , i have 1 80 gb drive and i want to share it to a win98 network.

The idea is to have the music in the hard drive avalidable for the win98 network,
just as a shared folder, with no passwords.

I have tried several configurations but i can't get it to work right.

Any ideas ?

Thanks in advance =)

samba shared folder
 

You may want to consider this as your entry for your smb.conf

[HDD]
comment = shared area
path = /shared
public = yes
writable = yes

The above assunmes that the you have included wins support and a few other items
in the main body of smb.conf. Also that you have a directory /shared that the music or other
to be shared stuff is in.

Anyway, the above works for me. If you have problems, post back.

I have been searching the internet, but all the examples i could find use user and password.

The files are going to be shared in a windows 98 network, so they have to be able to see the files just by clicking in the folder.

My fstab entry look like this:

[Peliculas]
comment = Peliculas
path = /mnt/80gb/Peliculas
public = yes
writable = no
browseable = yes
guest ok = yes

I think it's ok, what i need are the entries from the main body.

There is a lot of stuff i don't understand if you could point me to somewhere i can read about it, it would be great =).

Thanks again

I have configured Samba, i start the service, but there is no responce when i try from any of the client machines, and when i try to get the list of sared folders from the linux i get this error

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
smbclient -L //xago3

added interface ip=192.168.0.252 bcast=192.168.0.255 nmask=255.255.255.0
session request to XAGO3 failed (Not listening for calling name)
session request to *SMBSERVER failed (Not listening for calling name)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Edited: 03/02/05

I had an error in the host allow section, allready fixed.

I finally got it working.

The idea of this configuration is to create shares for windows clients, that are accesible with out any client configuration, without setting any user or needing a password. This are the steps i followed in order to make it work, but I am rather new to linux so some of the steps might not be necesary.

I am assuming you allready have samba installed.

1. In order to work you have to create the user pcguest (or the user you defined in "guest account") and set a passwordless account for samba. You can do it with this 2 command lines.

#usually we dont need the user to be able to use any other service so this prevents the user from login into the system.

useradd -s /sbin/nologin pcguest

#this sets a passwordless samba account for pcguest

smbpasswd -a -n pcguest


2. You need to edit samba's config file "smb.conf" usually located at /etc/samba/smb.conf

[global]

workgroup = Trans
server string = xagotrans
netbios name = Server
hosts allow = 192.168.0. 127. Server
guest account = pcguest
invalid users = root
smb passwd file = /etc/samba/smbpasswd
null passwords = yes
log file = /var/log/samba/%m.log
max log size = 1000
security = user
encrypt passwords = yes
smb passwd file = /etc/samba/smbpasswd
unix password sync = Yes
passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u
passwd chat = *New*password* %n\n *Retype*new*password* %n\n *passwd:*all*authentication*tokens*updated*successfully*
pam password change = yes
obey pam restrictions = yes
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
interfaces = 192.168.0.252/24
dns proxy = no
preserve case = yes
short preserve case = no
default case = lower
case sensitive = no
map to guest = bad user

#Example of a public share avalidable to anyone with read only permisions

[Peliculas]
comment = Peliculas
path = /mnt/80gb/Peliculas
public = yes
writable = no
browseable = yes
guest ok = yes



3. Third you need to set the permisions of the shared directory so that the windows clients can read the shared stuff, this 2 command lines will to that

chown -R root:root /mnt/80gb
chmod -R 755 /mnt/80gb


4. After all is done just start samba and try it

/sbin/service smb start

in some distributions the start command is

/etc/init.d/service smb start

And with a little luck you have your samba server up and running, you can see the shares with the following command

# where Server is the name you asigned in "Netbios name"

smbclient -L //Server