Newbie samba problems + Lan bandwidth
 

Hi being a newbie to linux i am currently in the process of setting up samaba. I have done as instructed by my bible "linux for dummies" and the computer now appears on the windows network. But when i try and access the linux Pc in windows i get a message saying. No access allowed. Underneath this it says

"you were not connected becasue a duplicate name exists on the network"

could some one help, i have done some background reading and i do not really understand all this business about hosts and DNS support.

Could anyone help to clarify this in simple terms.

Second topic

I am very keen to be able to monitor my Lan bandwidth usage, does anyone know of a program i could use that is simple to install and use.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Karl

Sorry can't help you on your second question...

But the first I may be able to!

That message tells me that there are two computers on your network with the same hostname.

Since you saw the message as soon as you put your linux box on the network, then we know that the linux box has the same name as something else. How many computers do you have connected? If just the two then you should be able to change the name of one of them and be good to go!

Actually I'm going to take a step back and say you should be able to change the name of the SMB share within your Samba config file.

Sorry, don't want to send you down the wrong path, as it is a samba config issue and not a dns issue.

I currently live in a student house and we have 5 PC's conected to the network all windows and one linux. Two of the PC's use chinese windows if that makes any difference.

Is a windows host name the same as a computer name.

I changed my linux host name in the DNS network box but this casuse some problems when logging on.

Karl

Yes I would expect it would cause problems.

Windows has a computer name and a workgroup name. When you configure samba, you are assigning a computer and workgroup name to the linux machine as well. (This is separate from the unix hostname assigned to it) Samba uses "windows-speak" to talk to the other true windows computers on the network and uses the name/workgroup you put into the config. Actually this is NetBIOS I guess

I would double check your smb.conf file and make sure the workgroup name is the same as the windows machines, then I would change the netbios name line and give it a different name there. Maybe test-samba or something like that. Then restart samba (or reboot the linux computer if that's easier)

Then you should be able to see the server named "test-samba" in windows networking.

yep tried all of that and its does not seem to make a difference, i can see the linux machine in windows with a different name. But again access is not be granted as a duplicate name exists.

Oh well

thanks for the help

I have this problem too (FC3). I think it is because no matter how you config the samba.conf file, the linux computer name is 'localhost.' When your windows box trys to browse \\localhost, it finds itself AND the linux box. Theres the duplications :(. I'm a newb, so I'm afraid I'mn just as helpless as you :(.

Any gurus out there?

Can you post a copy of your smb.conf?

Wouldn't that cause problems in itself, seeing how localhost, aka 127.0.0.1 is essentially a link from a computer to itself?
I don't know what would happen if you set the computer's name to localhost (I only have 15 minutes left, and my laptop doesn't restart that fast or I'd try it out :P), but I'll find out when I get home tonight.

[edit]By the way, such a monitoring tool would be interesting indeed ... if I happen to come across any I'll post it here :)[/edit]

I've just run into the same problem. Seems you are correct, my XP box is seeing two "localhosts". This is kind of a pain, and I can't remember how I got it to work before other than it was working pretty ok before I installed about 273 critical FC3 updates earlier today... Heh.

In any case, I'm going to keep looking for an answer to this as I have all of my digital crap spread across three separate boxes and would like to consolidate them onto the FC3 box.

I got it. I did some reading up on Samba and went through my smb.conf line by line to see if I could make heads or tails out of it. As I said before, I'm running Fedora Core 3, the latest build (as of today at least). I'm an old hand at Windows and have dabbled in Linux over the years, but I'm finally making a concerted effort to bend it to my will rather than the other way around. ;)

I'm still pretty new to Linux so please understand my perspective. This is how I'd have wanted this written for me, but's still satisfying to figure it out for yourself (finally, and after reading a lot of Google searches ;) ) Here's what I did:

(I su'd in a terminal window and used evim to edit these files.)

I was trying to figure out why I couldn't change the name of my linux box, and ended up changing /etc/hosts to:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain linuxbox

Then I went into the Samba Config file.
evim /etc/samba/smb.conf

I'm not sure if case is important when working within evim, but I changed the first line from workgroup = mshome to:
workgroup = MSHOME (mshome appears in uppercase on the Windos machines but is still lower case when I access the Samba Server settings in the GUI.. so methinks this might be irrelevant.)

I also enabled the hosts allow entry (removed the semi-colon), and made it point specifically to my subnet:
hosts allow = 192.168.0.

Then I changed the security mode to user.
security = user

I left everything else default and saved the file.

I then set up my Samba Users via the Samba Server Configuration utility:
Applications -> System Settings -> Server Settings -> Samba

and made user1 and created a password for "him". Under the security tab in the Server settings dialog, my:
Auth Mode is set to User
Auth Serv is blank
Kerberos Realm is blank
Encrypt Passwords is set to Yes
Guest Account is set to user1.

Then I closed that utility and went to my windos machine (XP Pro), looked at Network Places, View Workgroup Computers, and there it was, Samba1(linuxbox). I double clicked and had to enter user1 and his password, and then I was in.

Conclusion: I'm still learning about security and routing and all that, and I'm also going to document everything I figure out in order to help others in my situation. I welcome any additional comments you all might have.