Hi, I would post this under Newbie, but the instructions say put it in the general forum since it involves Windows.

I have just added a Fedora C4 box to my home network and I was impressed how slick it installed and runs! Feeling ambitious I have tried to set up SAMBA and APACHE, they installed fine but I cannot access either. For this thread I will just concentrate on the SAMBA issue.

I followed the instructions in the SAMS book "Red Hat Fedora 4 Linux All in One" to install and configure Samba. As a result I can access the share directories on my Windows machines from the Linux box and the Linux share directory (called exchange)appears in the Network Places list on the Windows machines but when I try to display the contents of the Linux share directory from a windows machine I get the error message:

\\LINUX\exchange is not accessible. You may not have permission to use this resource.

I have redone the configuration several times with no effect. In desperation I tried making the system wide open. I disabled the firewall, set Samba to allow anyone to access the share directory, set the access permissions for the home, user and share directories to 777 and made sure that the share directory is configured within SAMBA. After all this it still does not work. HELP!!!

What filesystem is the linux share directory? If it is a linux filesystem, then you won't be able to access it.

OK, I installed a new hard drive when I made my linux box and let the Redhat installer make the whole drive a single linux partition. Do I have to reduce the size of this partition and add a FAT32 partition to the drive or is there an easier way to add support for windows file structure? If I have to make a seperate partition for the windows files, should I devide the linux part while I am at it - for instance is there any security benefit to putting the home directory in a seperate partition?

The benefit of putting your /home directory in it's own partition is that if something goes horribly wrong and you have to re-install linux, most of your settings will be kept.

If you want windows to be able to see your samba share, it has to be a share of a FAT32 or NTFS, as those are the only 2 filesystems that windows recognizes. FAT32 is preferred, as linux cannot reliably write to NTFS(it's pretty good, but there's a chance of corrupting the partition).

For example. I have an 80 GB drive I use for my Operating systems. I have one 20GB NTFS partition for my XP install, a 5.7gb ext3 partition for my / , a 1gb swap, a 5.8gb ext3 partiton for my /usr directory, and a 41.7gb ext3 partition for my /home directory. I also have an 80gb and a 200gb drive as FAT32 for storage. The main limitation of FAT32 is that you can't have any files that are larger than 4gb. This means that any DVD iso's you might have you can't store them in a FAT32 filesystem.

It all depends on how you want to set it up. I would always suggest that your home directory at least be on it's own partition.

When sharing files over the network the filesystem type does not matter because it is the OS on the server that does the actual read/write process not the client. A FAT32 partition is used for sharing files on a dual boot PC.

Post your smb.conf file. Are you using security = user or security = share? For security = user you will need to add a smbpasswd user for your username. i.e.
smbpasswd -a username (need to be root).

I would enable netbios of tcp/ip in the tcp/ip properties of your ethernet adapter on the windows box. Also check for errors in the smbd and nmbd log files. /var/log/samba. You need to be root to access the logs.

Actually this is a legitimate networking question.

Hmm.. interesting, I didn't know that. I'll test it.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Linux-Networking and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.