Hi there. I would like to ask someone for a help with Samba. There are 2 PCs on my home LAN. First one is Mandrake Linux 8.1 box (192.168.1.2) and the other one is Win98 PC (192.168.1.3). All I need is to access data FROM the Linux box on the Win98 HDD. Both PCs are connected to the Internet via DSL/router (192.168.1.1). So here are my questions:

1) Do I need to install Samba server to access the Win98 HDD?

2) Is all I need Samba client (2.2.3) and Samba common (2.2.3) rpm files (both are installed except Samba server)?

3) How to modify the smb.conf file in /etc/samba directory?

And I am using LinNeighborhood as a GUI.

Thanks for any help.

1) yes

2) no, if you are serving from linux, you only need trhe server rpm really, installnig them all is probably the easiest option tho

3) well you need to define what shares you wish to let windows see. a share can be very simply defined in a few lines, i share my web folder locally with...

[web]
path = /var/www/html
comment = cake web files
public = yes
read only = no

the rest of the conf file should be fairly standard, you may well want to start from scratch tho, as there's vastly more in th default file than you need, and it's not a scary config file in the slightest to write from scratch.

why do you want to use linneighborhood? it's a whole lot easier to not bother, and just mount any windows shares directly. you can then just access them in any file manger type gui.

here is the command to mount the windows shares.


make the mount point directory first

mkdir /mountpoint

then mount it

mount -t smbfs //server/share /mountpoint -o username=david,password=passwd



if you don't need a username and passwd to access the shares use this....


mount -t smbfs //server/share /mountpoint


unmount like this...

umount /mountpoint

or...

umount //server/share

OK, Samba is now running but I can't connect to the Win98 share directory. I will be more descriptive:

1. On Linux machine, I am logged as a regular user (not su) "merlin" in KDE enviroment. I have a directory called "Share" in my home directory (for sharing) - /home/merlin/Share

2. On Win98 side, there is a directory called "share" - c:\share and the computer is called "Janny93" in Network Identification properties.

3. When I do : smbmount //Janny93/share /home/merlin/Share
than I get 8 lines of this error:

tdb((null)) : tdb_open_ex: could not open file /var/cache/samba/unexpected.tdb: No such file or directory

Please help. If there is any help ..... :-(

Filip

does it work as root?

if so it could be a permissions problem. If not samba is not installed correctly. You may have to create a directory or something


did you try the command I suggested?

Thanks for help. The problem was with firewall on my PC (I guess). I did a fresh new install without firewall, setup Samba again and everything works perfect. Now I can mount and access the Win98 data and also from Win98 the Linux data system. There is only one problem with password. When I try to acces Linux from Win, than It would ask me for a password so I need to add a user and password to smspasswd file. Right?
And is there a way how to unmount the Win data without? The command "smbumount" doesn't work for me.
But anyway, thanks for all help from you all.

just use umount, it'll unmoount anything. well, kinda. it doesn't unmount horses... but that's from a very old thread...