samba server guide?
 

It's me again. I got my ftp server working like a charm on the RH 9 linux box. Now I need to setup samba so I can see the linux box on my windows machines as well. Plus the next step would be to share the printer that I have.

I'm looking for a newbie type guide, I've looked at many but none I could complete.

Perhaps someone wants to give me some guidance?

Regards,
deWin.

Well, you SHOULD just be able to run the Samba GUI that comes with RedHat, and set it all up through there. SAMBA is supposed to be fairly easy to use, but I just happen to be having rpblems with it. Anyways, Samba GUI should just be under System Setting -> Server Settings -> Samba Server on your gnome Panel (the RH equivelent of the task bar/Start menu). And there's plenty out there for setting up Samba on the internet, just need to search for it.

What have you done? What changes did you make to your smb.conf file? Did you add users to your samba database?

-twantrd

Thanks for the responses. I've configured it from the GUI already, I can see it but can't go into the shared folders. I believe it's a username authentication issue as it's asking for a username but not authenticating, even if I punch in root's. I believe there is a way to create samba users, I was wondering if I can do it from the shell instead of GUI. I couldn't figure out how I'd create samba users anyways. So in a nutshell, it's running, I can see my linux box but just can't access it. I hope this should help and I now realize that I should've included this bit of detail in my first post. Sorry about that, was very sleepy :)

Any ideas?

dewin,
to addusers in samba you must go to a shell and login as su then type the password.

run this
smbpasswd -a "username" > enter
New Password: bigsecret
Confirm Password:bigsecret

If your smb.conf file is setup right you then should have folders created for them after this.

For more information you can go to www.samba.org for documentation and more help.
You really will do yourself a favor and NOT rely on the GUI to configure Samba. It is a lot more powerful doing the configuration yourself and learn it that way.

I recently purchased a great book for Samba 3.0x and it is striaght forward and easy to understand.
"The Official Samba -3 How to and Reference Guide.
By: John H. Terpstra
Jelmer R. Vernooij
This is a must have for Samba Administrators.

Good Luck

That was easy enough. Thanks a bunch. Now just a question as I'm not on the linux box anymore for the day. I created this user, it's created, I also did set shares in GUI long time ago. Will those same shared folders be loaded in the config or am I going to have to reconfigure it. I'm assuming if I want to configure shared folders, I'll have to go in GUI and if I want to do it in shell, I'll have to manually edit the smb.config file or something.

Honestly, I'm getting much better at this, I can feel it. Thanks for everyone's help here on linuxquestions. I'm learning and learning fast.

dewin,
Post your smb.conf file.
THis will tell us if the folders are being created on the fly or they are being made manually.
I like mine created when I setup the account that way I know that Samba makes a link to it.

Later,

run the command: testparm

which will test your smb.conf file and global settings

once your shares are configured correctly, you should be able to map then on m$ like any other network share (depending if your using encrypted passwords or not). To have your linux box bring up the share everytime you boot up, add the following lines to your /etc/fstab file:

//server/sharename /sharename smbfs username=username,password="bigsecret" 1 0


then just mount the share...

Actually, I created the user and tried going into my linux box, it asked for the password and it did let me in. I can see the shares I created when I was in GUI version of samba and it retained the settings.

Can I just put ./smb start in startup to launch it?

You need to start two programs, smbd and nmbd, to start samba.

http://www.linuxvoodoo.com/resources...mba/samba2.php

smbd -D
nmbd -D
winbindd -D

these are the commands to Start samba

Cool! I'm gonna do that and restart my server. Sounds very good and thanks once again for all the help in getting me to linux.