I apologize if this is posted in the wrong forum.

I am a Linux Newbie so please bear with me. I have a small home p2p network without a domain with six Linux boxes and three Windows boxes. The Linux boxes are all using the 64bit Kubuntu 7.04 while the Windows boxes are XP Pro SP2 and W2K SP5. The Linux boxes are dedicated Folders and aren't used for anything else and require 64bit Linux to run. What I need to do is setup a single folder on each of the Linux boxes to be seen by the Windows boxes to enable monitoring of the Folding Client. I have the FAH Monitoring software installed on my Windows boxes and have had no problems getting it to monitor all of the Windows folding clients. What I can't seem to figure out is how to make the FAH client folder on each of the Linux boxes visible to my Windows boxes. The Linux boxes have no problems browsing to and accessing any shared folders on any of the Windows boxes and the Linux boxes have no problems accessing any of the shared folders on ANY of the Windows and Linux boxes so the basic network connection must be okay. I just can't figure out how to make the shared Linux FAH client folders visible to the Windows boxes. I've been fighting this since January with no success. When I attempt to access the Linux boxes from Windows I am prompted for a user name and password which I enter. The problem is that they it just keeps prompting for the user name/password but never allows me access to the share. I've searched through forums, faq's, online manuals and nothing works. The people who have attempted to help can't seem to understand that I'm new to linux and don't have a lot of fundamental Linux background. They start posting instructions that are way too technical to understand and absolutely refuse to give anything other than general instructions such as make sure that Samba is installed and correctly configured. Yeah, that's a lot of help. I know that I need to have Samba installed and configured and have installed it As far as I know it's running, but I don't have a clue how to properly configure it because none of these guys will take two minutes to explain HOW to configure it. They start telling me I need to edit some script or file. Of course they fail to tell me where to find the file or what I need to edit in it.

Another problem is that I'm getting conflicting instructions on user names. One group says to make sure to use the same user name and password on the linux boxes that I use on the Windows boxes and the other group tells em the opposite. Which way is correct? All of the Windows boxes use the same user name and password. Do I use that in Linux as well or what.

I can't understand why this is so difficult. I can setup the share in Windows with a few mouse clicks in under a minute. Six months later I still can't get it to work in Linux.

Now is there some Linux user around here that is willing to take pity on a beginner and provide step by step, click here, check this box, enter user name here, etc. instructions so I can get this working as I'm ready to shut all of the Linux boxes down and stop folding on them for good if I can't get this working in the next few days. I would consider switching to a different version of Linux if that would be easier to setup, but it needs to be one that fully supports the hardware monitors on Intel 965P chipset boards (temp/voltages/etc) and nVidia 6100 and 6200 vid cards.

First, are you running Samba? That is the program that allows Windows boxes to access Linux folders. If not, is Samba installed on your system?

Once you have Samba installed and running (I can help there, too), you will need to create the users and logins under Samba so they can login from their Windows boxes. You DON'T need to have Linux logins for them - just Samba logins.

Also, in the Samba configuration on the Linux box, you will specify which folders are accessible.

I will gladly help you get it running. I can set up a box with Kubuntu 7.04
on it so we can "mirror" our work.

Ron H
W7HD

Hi,

did you read the Samba guide or Using Samba? I can understand that you're pretty fed up searching for the missing pieces of information, but maybe this is what you were looking for. Besides, there's lot of other documentation on the Samba homepage; just in case you've missed that so far.

Basically, you can either

• edit /etc/samba/smb.conf
• see man smb.conf or the docs mentioned above for the format
• execute /etc/init.d/samba restart

or you

• install the swat package
• start SWAT using /etc/init.d/swat start
• point your browser to http://localhost:931
• configure Samba using a convenient web interface

Plus there's other GUIs available, but hopefully the above will get you running in a matter of minutes. Post back if not.

Besides, I don't think the user names you choose matter much, since Windows will ask you for user name and password on connection. You should know however that the user name and password you have to supply have nothing to do with the users on your Linux boxes - Samba maintains its own user database. It's in /etc/samba/smbusers, but you should also be able to set up users using SWAT.

I hope that (finally) helped.

Thanks for replying guys. I really do appreciate it. Samba is installed, but I don't know how to tell if it's running or not. I have tried reading the info on the Samba website, but the more I read the more confused I got (but that might have had something to do with the level of frustration I had achieved by that time). I've tried going into the Samba Configuration from the System Settings, but all of the options are greyed out. I found the /etc/samba/smb.conf file mentioned and pasted it below.



I'm fairly confused at this point as to where to add or edit the user info. Can I simply add the required info to this file? And if I do that, how do I 'execute /etc/init.d/samba restart'?

Windows is using the workgroup "MSHOME". I would like to add the user name of "dummie" with a password of "123456" (I can change them once I figure out where it goes and the correct format). The only folder that is to be shared at this point is "/home/Rev/folding" which appears to be set. I assume that any and all files and folders in the 'folding' folder will be shared ( /home/Rev/folding/fah/queue.dat for instance)

Do I need to enter a separate user/pw for each of the boxes or can they all use the same one (as more than one may be accessing at any given time).

I think Ubuntu has some GUI tools for all these tasks, so presumably that goes for Kubuntu, too. Since I don't know where you can find them or what exactly they can do, I can only help you with the equivalent shell commands: when I tell you to "execute" something, I mean you should open a console window (Konsole for KDE) and enter the something there. Some commands (like the /etc/init.d stuff) require root privileges, so you have to prepend them with "sudo " (which asks for your password now and then). For example, "sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart" would restart Samba.

Execute "ps ax | grep smbd" and see whether this turns up something. For me this gives
which means Samba is running. The numbers will probably differ.

Assuming you're speaking about smb.conf, no. The simplest way is probably to execute (without sudo) "smbpasswd" and specify a password. This will register the current user into /etc/samba/smbpasswd. Note that while the username will be the same for logging into Kubuntu locally and for accessing FOLDING from another machine, you can have two different passwords for these tasks. So far I haven't needed to add Samba users without an associated Linux account, which seems to be somewhat more involved.

Add the following to the top of your smb.conf:
I'm not sure what you mean. Of course you can use the same user/pw for the Samba servers on all Kubuntu boxes and I guess using the same user/pw on all clients should work too (although in that case you could as well use share-level security). Automatically using the same set of users/passwords on all servers is possible, but difficult to set up.

P.S.: You might be interested in this thread on ubuntuforums.org.

Edit: fixed a typo in the test for a running Samba server.

To add your samba user, you could try to open a root terminal and enter:

You may have to add the user to the system in advance.

One user is enough, you can use the same user name in every linux box.

And yes, everything below folding is shared.

One of the most frustrating things I have ever had to do with this mixed environment was to deal with the same problem. The crux of this trouble is knowing what the Windoze boxes are going to use as the username/password when they try to log on over SMB to access remote resources. On an XP box, the name and password is the same as the one you use to log on to the XP box. For the Win2K machines, you can search the registry for a Network Logon, or you can do what I did, which is to use a Linux program called tcpdump to trace the packets that flow in each direction when the Win2K box attempts the remote connection. (Sorry, I can't remember the Registry key name; I gave up and moved from Windoze 98 to XP a couple of years ago.)

In either case, if you have differing Windoze logon names, but want them all to map to a single user on the Linux boxes, you can readily do that by putting the names into yet another configuration file on the Linux boxes. First, in /etc/samba/smb.conf, add or edit a line to say

username map = /etc/samba smbusers

Then, in that file, you would put lines that say how the Linux samba server should handle a particular Windoze username. For example,
/etc/samba/smbusers would contain something like this

george = "George Smiley"

Well I'm finally making some progress. I have successfully configered one of the Linux rigs and can now access the F@H folder from my Windows boxes. Still having problems with the others though. I'm going to try a fresh install on them to see if that helps as I've probably really screwed something up on them during all of the previous attempts to get it working. I'll post back with any further news.

Okay, now we're cooking. Installed Ubuntu 7.04 on one of the systems that was acting up (decided to give GNome a try). Installed Samba, set the folder to share, did the smbpasswd bit and oila. Working like a charm. Don't know if it's the difference in Ubuntu vx Kubunto or just working with a clean install but it's working. Three more systems to go and them I'm done. Might stick with Ubuntu for the others as it seems to be easier to configure.

Thanks for everyone's help. I'm sure I'll have some other questions eventually.

You r running Samba? That is the program that allows Windows boxes to access Linux folders. If not, is Samba installed on your system? If not then install Samba and configure it.

edit /etc/samba/smb.conf
see man smb.conf or the docs mentioned above for the format
execute /etc/init.d/samba restart

shailesh2000 if you read ALL of the posts you would have the answers to your questions as well as known that I have already got it working. Plus, the instructions you gave were posted several posts prior to yours. Nice try though.