Vista issues with SMB, fixed with rinetd
 

Just a brief 'HowTo' if anyone seems to be having issues with Microsoft Vista and file sharing.

If you are having trouble with Vista connecting to a file or print server which uses Samba, it may be due to two reasons. Vista wants to use the new Samba protocol to make this happen, and there is a work-around here about it:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/Sho...60925&SiteID=1

However, our office's Vista Business Edition did initially work with this but it STOPPED working after a MS update. We have no idea why, nor exactly when since it was autoupdating and the user was no longer with us.

However, it seems that Vista now wants to connect via Port 445 rather than port 139 (the old SMB port) but it uses the same protocol.

We used the program 'rinetd' to redirect port 445 to 139, and the connection now works (note: the above 'fix' still needed to be in place). This was with the older Samba 2.2.7a. The app (for us) was located in /usr/sbin/ and the config file at /etc/rinetd.conf That file is as simple as the IP and port of the incoming traffic, and the IP and port of the redirect. Our example was this:

And we were up and running again.

I hope this helps someone, or at least me in the future when I go a-lookin'.

From the Samba 3 Reference Guide:

Thanks for the quote; ours was a situation with Samba 2.2.7a however, just to point that out to readers.

If you have Vista hosts, I think you will want to upgrade to a recent samba version.