I have a very weird problem with samba. Windows is saying service is not started, but centos is saying samba is running:

While from windows xp when i double click a share folder, it says that i dont have the right permissions, or that the share doesnt exist. Also when double click the terminal, on the 'view workgroup computers' i get a similar error saying the service is not running.

Very weird. This started to happen after i was playing with vsftpd. I shut down samba for whatever reason i did, and then started it back up and was getting the above messages.

Is this problem because of samba or centos? I did add myself to smbpasswd, and the workgroup is correct. Everything was fine before i stopped and started the service.

Any ideas guys?

Thanks.

Can we see the config file? I know I've made changes to a config file and forgotten to reload/restart, so when the machine rebooted weeks later it loaded the new changes to the config.... You may also want to check you firewall.
I had a similar issue with Samba under Ubuntu - it showed up, but gave similar errors to what you're seeing. Seems it (the GUI configuration, first time I didn't edit the config files) does not add this line by default:
public = yes

in the global section.

Dump of my service definitions, testparm
no errors from testparm.

forgot to add, no firewall, selinux disabled, and ive started->reload->restart plenty of times. ive also used yum to remove samba, and reinstalled it... still nada

I think i might have figured out the problem. The name of my centos machine is localhost. Im getting a error now saying that a computer with a duplicate name is on the network.

Does it make sense that the computer name is causing issues? if so, how do i change it?

I'm curious as to this line:
hosts allow = 192.168.1., 107.

That probably should be 127., not 107.
Also try adding
public = yes
in your [global] section so that others can see it.
Yu can check the hostname by issuing the "hostname -f" command to see the FQDN. "hostname -a" might also be of use. These are normally changed in your /etc/sysconfig/network file.

Thanks Jake. The only thing i changed was 107 to 127. I thought making the conf have at 107 made samba only allow connections from 192.169.1.x thru 192.169.1.107

But thanks, it worked.

I had a power outage last night, and my server went down with it of course. I when i turned it back on and started the samba service I am getting the errors again. So its a problem with centos.

Heres the error from winxp's 'view workgroup computers', when i double click the centos server i get:

This a different error than what i initially posted, but this was an error that happened after i reinstalled samba, but got past it.

Any ideas?

My father's desktop does that at his house. There's only 2 computers - 1 laptop and 1 desktop (both WinXP), and it will do it if both of them are on. I've verified that the hostnames are different. They're connected through a generic router.
I plugged his desktop into my network and got the same message. I didn't have any Win machines on the network at the time, and I guarantee that none of my machines have the same network name as his desktop. These machines were connected to my Cent firewall/router.
I doubt it's a problem with CentOS. I'm thinking there was a patch that hosed things, or maybe a discreet bug/virus that the virus scanners haven't caught yet. You don't use Earthlink do you by chance? I had a heck of a time with that on his desktop. Plugging him into my network caused DNS to stop working on his machine - even when I put my DNS servers that I run into his DNS entries blocks under TCP/IP. It took me 3 hours to finally get Earthlink off of his computer far enough to be able to surf to www.yahoo.com (and the Earthlink software would let him go to www.yahoo.com at his house on an Earthlink cable modem, but failed a "yahoo.com" lookup with no www.), but he still gets the duplicate hostname error. Even on his network where there are no Linux machines at all, so don't blame CentOS. I'm not saying it's Earthlink, but if you're using the same software, there's no such thing as coincidence.....

i've had this happen when user/group permissions get out of sync... try chown, chmod everything if needed?

Thanks jake and cope. I am not using earthlink, I have opt online, nor do I have software from them installed. I have 2 samba shares, one for homes(default settings), and /smbshr (770 owner is root, group is smbshr, which I am a part of). Since it maybe be windows, should I rename windows, so it doesnt know the name localhost?

Thanks

Can't hurt. I tried it on my father's PC several times with no luck. Let us know how it turns out though.