Ok, I've spent all day trying to figure out samba in mandriva 2009. Never had any issues with it in kubuntu or suse.

I have tried to set it up as basic as possible, just going through the gui that mandriva gives you. I've set it up both as a PDC or a standalone, both with user and share level authentication. I have stopped and started both the network and smb services multiple times every time. I've gone through smb.conf to the best of my abilities after each time setting it up, and I have no idea what could be wrong.

Basically, the smb service starts up, all of my shares are set up, but I cannot see my server from either a linux machine or a windows machine. It has to be something simple that I am missing.

So, should I be set up as a standalone server? This is the only machine on the network that will be sharing via samba, so this would be the way, right? Also, I have users configured, and with share level security, I should be able to see the share, and then be prompted for a password, right?

Oh and my network is configured properly. I can ping and ftp between machines.

This has been devilishly difficult, and it is something that I am doing wrong, so could someone please kind of walk me through this?

I'd start with your firewall settings. See http://us3.samba.org/samba/docs/man/...#firewallports for a start

You have no idea how stupid I feel. I messed with this thing all day.

The default firewall settings have everything blocked. If I recall properly, ubuntu doesn't install a firewall by defualt. I guess I just forgot all about it.

Thanks.

You're welcome - glad it worked. It often helps to have a fresh set of eyes (so to speak) on a problem

BM