I've followed the install instructions exactly, however now I need to run smbd, but there is no smbd! It looks like all the other files were installed, but this one isn't where it's supposed to be! Any ideas?

Alright, for some reason the source code I downloaded just wasn't working... however I found that samba was available through the distro, so now it's working. Although I can't figure out how to specify my login info when connecting to a share. It presents me with "Password:" but there's no place to specify the username!

I am not an expert with samba but I have set it up quite a few times and has been my experience that if you cant get access to the shares you dont have the authorization through the samba server. I would make sure your user name matches and you know the passwords match. go to the etc/samba/ directory and do add the passwords with smbpasswd. you can find the password commands from that directory by typing smb and hitting the tab key twice. this will give you a list of other commands. after adding the passwords you need to do a smbd restart command. then windows will allow you access. I dont think you have to restart windows. I cant tell you all the ins and outs of the security but
it helps if you make sure the user names and passwords match


one final note. I know red hat linux not gentoo so the directories may not be the same but I am sure the principles ar e the same

The problem I ended up running into was that I would try adding users with smbpasswd and it would say "can not open passdb database". I don't remember what I did, but eventually it started working and now everthing is okay! I think it had something to do with the smb.conf... Anyway, the most annoying thing to me is that I found 4 or 5 different sources on how to install Samba, and they all said different things. Most of them never said anything about smbpasswd or adding users!! Linux is great because it's so well documented... But on the few occasions that it's not, it can be really frustrating.