Hey all,

I am running a Red Hat 8.0 Professional, using Samba. I can see the Linux box in the "Network Neighborhood" of all the Windows machines on the network, but if I try to map a network drive to a Samba share, I get this:

The network path \\goliath\chris could not be found.

Goliath is the hostname of the linux box, of course. Anyone know what's going on? I know my smb.conf file should be correct because this used to work in Red Hat 7.2. After I went to 8.0, is stopped working. Ports 137, 138, and 139 are listening on both tcp and udp. I don't know anything about firewalls in Linux, and I don't even know if I have one installed. I have read that a firewall could cause a problem like this one, but
A) How do I check to see if I have a firewall installed?
B) How do I turn it off, if I do?
C) Shouldn't it not matter whether I have a firewall or not, as long as those 3 ports are listening on both protocols?

Any ideas anyone? Thanks!!

Chris

PS. My knowledge of Linux is weird. I'm new to it, overall. Some things I know well, other things I don't know at all, and sometimes the "simple" things are the ones I don't know!

A) as root "ipchains -L" or "iptables -L" (depends what is installed)
B) run "lokkit" and select no firewall
C) If you have something listening on the ports another machine will still not be able to access them if the firewall rues say you can't

Can you access the share via the network path "\\goliath\chris" without mapping? If so, I can't imagine why it won't let you map it.

Did you just copy the config file from the RH 7.2 box to the RH 8 box? If the versions of samba are different there may be different variables that need to be specified. I always use the new config file and only copy parts of the old file (share definitions etc)

What version of windows are you using? It works fine for me with RH8 and XP.

David,

Thanks for the reply. I'm going to look into the firewall now, but before I do, let me say this. If I try to access the goliath linux machine from the network, I get asked for a username and password. No matter what I put in, it does not work. No error message, just asks me for the username and password again. Yes, I did copy over the entire samba directory from the old 7.2 installation to the new 8.0 installation, and maybe that has something to do with it, but I don't see why. All of my Windows machines are either Windows 2000 Pro or XP Pro, so they all use encrypted passwords. Can I ask you something else? If the firewall thing doesn't help, how do I uninstall Samba completely. Thay way, I can download the new version, install it, and just redo it all from the beginning(in case you are right about there being some weird variable)? I think that would be the next logical step.

Chris

Have you created users on the new machine using smbadduser and smbpasswd?

I wouldn't uninstall samba just yet but if you do want to in the future you can uninstall using
rpm -e package

Where pakage is the name of the package (in this case it would be samba)

Hi David,

No, I did not create new users on the new machine using those tools. Like I said, I copied over the old files to the new machine. Should I recreate the users and then restart the samba daemons? Hmmm... Maybe that would work. I'll try it and let you know. Thanks!

Chris

That could be it because smbpaswd stores the unix usernames in their numerical form. Try emptying the /etc/samba/smbpasswd file first.

Ok David,

I remade the smbpasswd file from the /etc/passwd file, and that made no difference. I didn't empty tha smbpasswd file before that, so I will try again. However, I'm beginning to wonder why any of this would have anything to do with th error I am getting on the Windows machines. Remeber, the error I am getting is:

The network path \\goliath\chris could not be found.

I don't know, we'll see. Thanks!

Chris

I think you are getting the error because samba doesn't let you access a share (even make it visable) until you ahve suppied a password - I would concentrate on getting access to shared directories using \\goliath and in turn I think this will solve your mapping problem.

Out of interedt what do you mean by "I remade the smbpasswd file from the /etc/passwd file"

Did you not use:
smbadduser

I ran

cat /etc/passwd | mksmbpasswd.sh > /etc/samba/smbpasswd

That takes your password file and builds a samba password file from it.

Chris

Ah - sorry - never pick up on that the first time - I usally just add users as they are needed with smbadduser.

David,

Once again, thanks for all your help with Sendmail! As far as Samba, I emptied the smbpasswd file and recreated it. A little better, as I am no longer getting the "The network path \\goliath\chris could not be found" error. Now, it is asking me for a username and password. I am logged into the Windows machine as "chris" with the same password as what Samba has. Still, it asks. Also, when I manually type "chris" and the password, it still is not working. Hmmm... Any other thoughts?

Thanks!

Chris

It appears to be a password problem.

Let us do it the old fashioned way.


Add a new user to the /etc/passwd file:

useradd testuser

Give the user a password:

passwd testuser

Add the same user to the /etc/samba/smbpasswd:

smbpasswd -a testuser

When you get the password prompt, try to log in as testuser.

If this doesn't work, post your smb.conf file so we can see if there are any inconsistencies.

Hi Jamrock,

I'll try that next, and let you know what happens. Let me ask you something... How could I go about posting the smb.conf file to the message board. I am accessing this website from a Windows machine. The linux box is hooked up to a kvm switch with the Windows machine. Could I just copy the smb.cone file to a floppy, then copy it to the Windows machine, and copy the text contents to the board? How would I do this? Thanks!

Chris

You could ftp it.

What is you security level set to in smb.conf?