I am attempting to set up a samba server on my Mandrake 9 box in order to share files with my XP Machine. I have set up the smb.conf file and have the two computers networked properly. ( I can ping back and forth) However, I can't even get the samba service to start! I have tried to start it many different ways:

# service smb start
# service smbd start
# /etc/init.d/smb start
# /etc/init.d/smbd start

Each time i'll get and error like:
Cannot find smb service or
No such file or directory

I'm not quite sure what else to try. If anybody could help me out I would greatly
appreciate it.

Try to start the service from Mandrake Control Center (if you can't find it on the menu's or if you are not running X, type "mcc" at the terminal).

Welcome to LQ.org by the way

Thanks for the advice megaman. But when i went into the mandrake control center, I could not find samba under the list of services. Thinking that maybe it was not installed for some reason (which seemed unlikely since i found the smb.conf file), I went into software management and tryed to install it and mandrake claims that everything is installed. If anyone could shed some light on this that would be great.

If you open up port 901 and type http://localhost:901, You can use SWAT (Samba Web Administration Tool). Its a nice program to help you get the feel for writing smb.conf files. It actually produces the files and you could manually modify them at your leisure. When done, seal port 901 back up lest you have a leak in the dam.

Daniel