recently switched to suse 9.2 from 9.1. I did a clean install, everything works fine except samba. When i try to search the samba network it comes up with an error message: "Unable to find any workgroups in your local network." Now, on suse 9.1 i had no problem. Also when i boot it says: "Skipped services in runlevel 5: smbfs nfs"

Hi,

I had the same problem, and ended up having to turn off the suse firewall to get it to work. There is probably a way to configure the firewall without having to turn it off completely, but i didn't mess with it. Hope that helps.

hey, i found some info for ya. You need to open ports TCP: 137, 138, 139 and UDP: 137. You can open these ports in expert mode of firewall config utility. It worked for me

I too am having trouble with Samba and the firewall. I tried opening the suggested ports and it did not help. Any other ideas?

I get the same errors part of the time.
If I reboot Linux, it will work for a few hours. It then quits working and giving me the "no workgroups found" message.
I have opened the ports mentioned and currently have the firewall (supposibly) turned off. Yast said that it would turn it off and remove the startup code used on reboot. Does it?

Or is the problem somewhere else?

I have used Yast to configure Samba - no difference.
I used the web page setup utility with Samba - no difference.
And I have reverted back to origional smb.conf, done manual edits, and still will not work reliably.

There is even more wrong than that. ..

I observed exactly the same behaviour. After installing samba (with YAST) I had to shut down the firewall to make it work.

Before shutting down the firewall I noticed that another service (http on port 80) was also not available anymore (although I checked it). Then I performed the following test:
- Uncheck the http serivce
- Restart the firewall
- Check the http service
- Restart the firewall
and the http service was available again! Still Samba was not working properly.

Now when I change the configuration of samba the only thing I do is editing /etc/samba/smb.conf and next I restart samba manually: /etc/init.d/smb restart

to be continued ....
This weekend I will try to make the firewall working again.

After some experimenting I found out the following:

Stop the firewall -> I could use the samba share
Start the firewall -> Samba shares could not be used anymore

In advanced settings (or edit it straight in /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewalll2) open all ports:
FW_SERVICES_EXT_TCP = 1:2048
FW_SERVICES_EXT_UDP = 1:2048
and start the firewall:
# SuSEfirewalll2 start

Again I cannot use samba

According to the help of the firewall it should be possible to see (in /var/log/messages) what is blocked when using the test mode. The firewall will not block anything but log in the logfile what would have been blocked by the filterrules. So let's try:
# SuSEfirewalll2 test

I tried to open the samba shares on my machine and ... nothing in the log file and again I could not reach the share.
# SuSEfirewalll2 stop

and ... I could use the share! So the firewall was blocking something after all although it should not have according to the help file!

A small note: I tried to use the shares from a Windows 98 machine and rebooted the machine between every step of my experiments.

I give up.
Since I am behind a hardware firewall I do not care much about this one and decided not using it until someone finds a solution to this problem.

Sorry Guys, do I feel stupid.

After giving blowing the wistle and giving up I gave it a final try on Google and found the solution:

(see http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba...ry/098121.html)

Put the following lines in the /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2 configuration file:
FW_SERVICES_EXT_TCP="microsoft-ds netbios-dgm netbios-ns netbios-ssn"
FW_SERVICES_EXT_UDP="netbios-dgm netbios-ns"

This opens the following ports
TCP: 137, 138, 139, 445
UDP: 137, 138

This is not enough, as I experienced before . The killer is this one:
FW_ALLOW_FW_BROADCAST="yes"

I just tried it and it works!

Hey just wanted to thank you.. Turning off the Firewall allowed me to see my Windows XP Files. Thanks for the help