At home we (myself & two flatmates) have our three computers networked together. This works fine under Windows, I can see them, they can see me (whilst I'm in Windows) and all is well. When I go into Linux, I can see their files (by putting in 'smb://DAVE/' in the 'address bar' of Konqueror) but they can't see mine. When they go into 'my network places' (God, how can Microsoft be doing this and getting away with it - argh!) they can see 'MSHOME' (the default setting for home networking under WinME) and MDKHOME (the default setting for home networking under Mandrake) and under MDKHOME there is THYMOX, but they can't see any files at all.

Here's the question (at last):

In order to see the files on my computer (when I'm running Linux) do they have to have Samba installed on theirs (I was under the impression that samba was used to see all SMB protocols, which Windows uses by default, so using it under Windows would seem a little bit pointless), or do I have to tweak some settings on mine.

Basically the only thing that they're likely to be accessing is the remarkably large partition I have set aside specifically for MP3 files. This is shared fine under Windows, and is mounted as '/mnt/mp3' under Linux.

How do I allow them to see '/mnt/mp3'?

My /etc/samba/smb.conf file says this...

[global]
security = user
preserve case = yes
null passwords = yes
encrypt passwords = no
workgroup = swingyourpants
server string = simon
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY
log file = /var/log/samba/%m.log
mangle case = yes
create mask = 0777
default case = lower
hosts allow = 10.0.0.2 10.0.1.2 10.0.0.1 10.0.1.1
directory mask = 0777

wins support = yes
wins proxy = yes
domain master = yes
preferred master = yes

[mp3]
path = /mp3
comment = mp3
writeable = yes
read only = no
public = yes
valid users = chris jon sarah aj

with this setup in place, any windows machine, correctly configured, can use my dedicated mp3 linux box.

you'll need to decide your own approach to getting round the smb password issues, either add the plaintextpasswrord registry hack, add encrypt passwords = yes to smb.conf or i think you can just set security = share, which doesn't need passwords.

to access from another linux box, they only need the samba client installed, which it already should be, no daemon services are required.

you'll proabably want to alter the file rights for the mp3 directory, and i
'd presume its a fat32 partition, which can be tricky to get going, due to it's... inferior.. file system... :-)