OK, here's the deal. I have a network of 3 Windows XP comps, a Windows 98 comp, and my new linuxbox running FC4 (referred to as the Lagbox). I would like to run Samba on the lagbox so that the windows comps can read and write to a single shared folder in the home directory (/home/shared) without having to use a username and password (I am behind a router and don't have anything i valuable shared). Is there any easy way to do this? Is there a GUI for samba that I could use to set this up? I have tried and the lagbox simple doesn't appear on the network.


Also, the lagbox will not browse my network. Is the Fedora firewall blocking it? I can find no control panel for it, yet it was mentioned in the install.

Hello! The GUI configuration and management tool for SAMBA is the Samba Web Application Tool aka SWAT. With SWAT you can create, delete and modify shares, restart the SAMBA daemons (SMBD and NMBD, the NetBIOS name service daemon) and view the config files. Check the SAMBA doc at www.samba.org for more information on SWAT.

If you already installed SWAT and still having trouble, here's a couple of gotchas I have encountered:

1. Win98 MUST login to Windows Network Neighborhood with an ID AND Password at startup. The ID / Password combination is sent to Linux/Samba the first time the Win98 machine attempts to view Linux shares. The ID should be present on the Linux machine, but if it isn't, SAMBA will map the ID to a "guest" account. FTP is a good candidate. Also, make sure the SAMBA global option "Encrypt Passwords" is set to "YES", as Win98 will send the password encrypted.

2. Printer sharing for WinXP: In CUPS you must specify an ID of guest@smb://Linuxhostname/printername, otherwise you get a WINNT logon failure or some such.

For debugging, set the log level to >0 in the SAMBA config (smb.conf).

Works for me, I've got 2 Win98s, 3 WinXPs and 1 Debian Linux w/SAMBA and each machine can read/write/print to any other machine.

Good luck! Cheers!

Check that printer device URI. The format should be as follows:

smb://guest@//hostname/printername

Hello,

How can I install Swat? I thought Swat comes with Samba, so when Samba has been installed so will swat. I'm puzzled! Swat is not in /etc/xinetd.d/, so I cannot edit swat.

I'v got Fedora core 4 installed. In the Fedora Linux 3 bible it says that the Swat service is by default off. To turn the service on , edit the /etc/xinetd.d/swat and change the disable = yes to disable = no. This makes the service available. Well since I have no swat in /etc/xinitd.d/ I cannot do that.

Can anyone tell me what to do to overcome this problem?

Reading the book I couldn't figure out how to get Swat installed.
Typing "rpm -qa | grep samba" resulted in:
"samba-common-3.0.14a-2
samba-client-3.0.14a-2
samba-3.0.14a-2
system-config-samba-1.2.31-1"

No samba-swat!
In a console I typed as root "yum install samba-swat". Indeed swat was being installed. But in order to turn on the swat service I typed as root in a console: "chkconfig swat on" with the following result: "bash: chkconfig: command not found".

I only did what the book says!

I'm pretty much puzzled.

By default "PATH" settings for user accounts do not include the /sbin directory where key system utilities like chkconfig are kept. This means that you cannot accidently run a system-altering utility, you have to explicitly put the full path to trigger the tool. In other words:

/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 smb on

Don't use just "chkconfig smb on", because that turns on the service for runlevel 2, aka single-user mode (which is like Safe Mode in Windows). Only critical services should run when the system is in single-user mode.