Can anyone tell me how to determine if samba is already installed on my system? And if I find that it is not installed, how I can install it? I am running Red Hat 7.1

Thanks.

Try this command while running as root:

find / -name 'smbd'

If you find anything relating to this daemon, you probably have Samba installed.

Also look in /etc and see if you have a file called smb.conf

I don't know Red Hat very well, but my Mandrake distro keeps my Samba config file in /etc.


Hope this helps.....

rpm -qa | grep samba

KevinJ,

Thanks once again for your help. After typing in rpm -qa | grep samba, I got the following reply:

samba-2.0.7-36
samba-common-2.0.7-36
samba-client-2.0.7-36

So apparently samba is already installed. Thanks!

Now, as root, type:

service smb status

to see if its running. You can edit the /etc/samba/smb.conf file to your needs and issue:

service smb restart

to make the changes take effect.

Kevin,

When I type in service smb status, I get a "bash: service: command not found" error.

Why would this be? I am logged in as root.

Thanks

I bet you "su"d to root. You need to "su -". That will execute root's profile.

The problem is when you just "su" you don't get the path variable for root. So you would have to type it out.

/sbin/service smb status

Kevin,

You were right about logging in with the su - command. That is not something I knew about.

After performing the service smb restart command I am now finally able to see the linux box when I open Network Neighborhood! However, when I click on the computer ("Localhost"), Windows gives me an error message:

\\Localhost is not accessible

The computer or sharename could not be found, make sure you typed it correctly.

What am I doing wrong?

Thank you so much for the help. I've been blindly fooling around with this for several weeks, and it's great to finally see the linux machine showing up in Network Neighborhood.

Oh- 2 other questions:

1- How can I change the name of the linux box (to something other than localhost)? Or is it necessary for me to keep that name?

2- How will I ultimately access files on the Windows computer from the linux machine? Is there anything analogous to Network Neighborhood in linux?

Thanks

Do you have anything shared? You would have accomplished that by editing the smb.conf file.
And are you logged into Windows with a valid Linux username and password? Not root, but some other user.

Also, change the name using the 'hostname' command:

hostname someotherhostname


For Linux Network Neighborhood:
http://www.bnro.de/~schmidjo/

KevinJ,

would these same commands work in Mandrake 8.0 also? I am also trying to hook up my samba server.

I believe so.

You might want to update /etc/hosts and c:\windows\hosts to reflect the name change too. And you'll need to enable clear text password on the Windows side or things, there is a .reg file to do this incase you haven't found it already.

Also is just using 'hostname' persistant, on Slackware using the hostname command will only work for the current session, if you reboot you'll loose the change. To make it persistant you need to edit /etc/HOSTNAME - dunno what the story will be on Redhat

cheers

Jamie...

I am not sure if the hostname command permanently sets the hostname or not. Try it and see. I can't try it right now, or I would give you definitive answer.

You will definitely want to update the hosts file on the Windows box, but I think the /etc/hosts on the Linux box is optional. It can't hurt.

As far as passwords go.. you can go either route. You can enable plain text on the Win9x box or you can enable encryption on the Linux box. I usually go the plain text route myself, but that will depend on your security needs.

How exactly do you enable plain text on the Win 9x box?

Read this:

/usr/share/doc/samba-2.0.7/docs/textdocs/Win95.txt