Having problems configuring Samba
 

I am running Debian on a VM to kind of get my feet wet with linux commands etc. So I am a complete novice at linux and so far have only spend 6-10 hours with it over the last few days.

So I installed Samba using the apt-get install command. I got it to install and began to be prompted with a configuration window. However I was not ready to fool with it at the time so I exited out of it by typing "exit" in terminal. Now I can not seem to get the configuration page back. Can anyone help me configure it?

http://www.debianadmin.com/file-serv...ing-samba.html

First pic is where I exited.

Well, I would suggest you take a look at the terminal and review "vi" and look at how to edit files directly as this will be a critical function you will have to perform. If you wish to use the debian configuration menus you can run the following command:

Well is there a way to almost re-do the whole thing from scratch? I have tried uninstalling the program, maybe I should try and delete all its contents, but I assumed the uninstallation did all this.

EDIT: Alright with a little help from my friends I was able to understand what you are saying. Now I need to figure out how to edit the file. Thanks.

The dpkg-reconfigure will walk you through all of the original configuration settings asked by the debian package manager. This seems like it may be a bit of an overwhelming task for a newer user, I would suggest learning the Linux file system standards and get some basic level exposure to bash and file editing. In the Linux world, the terminal is the backbone and is where you will need to spend quite a bit of time. Distributions have included graphical tools to make things easier for us, a great example is the dpkg configuration, that saves us the time of having to edit the configuration files and type in the directives manually. You should still have an understanding of how to do this before you become accustomed to using the graphical tools.


The book at http://www.linuxcommand.org/ is a great place to start as well as tldp.org has a tremendous amount of documentation. The beginners bash scripting guide is plenty more than you would need to feel comfortable doing these sort of tasks.


One last note, Samba can be very troublesome at times, I spend a lot of time dealing with it as a tenured system admin, especially when trying to do CIFS file system mounts. You may want to consider playing around with another app for learning like Apache that is a little less problematic. This is just my opinion.

I edited my last post, thanks for your help and all the links.

Now apache can be used for home networking even?

Apache is a web server, you can use it to serve anything over the HTTP protocol. This includes within your home network or over a public WAN. I assumed you just picked an application to play with to learn, if you are trying to accomplish something specific let us know and we can give you better advice. I just suggested Apache due to its ease of installation and how large the community is for support on it, you post an Apache related question on LQ you usually have an answer within a few minutes if it's a quick how-to style question.

Well what I really want to do is create a media server and use it as a network drive on windows.

But I am trying to get familiar with linux as a whole aswell. That linuxcommandline site is really interesting.

Well Samba is what you want to work with for a file share server. It can share media files but doesn't support streaming to say, your PS3 for instance.

You would want to take a look at a DLNA server, heres a good article to read over:

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online...er-in-a-Minute


Keep in mind that this getting into more of the intermediate to advanced level system admin tasks, you will have to deal with networking and learning a new protocol, although with some google and help form places like LQ you should be able to get there.

Let us know if you have any other specific questions and welcome to LQ.

Yeah these projects right now are probably a bit over my head right now, but it is something that I would eventually like to do. The linuxcommandline site is really good and well written. I am currently studying computer network over the next few years in college so it will be a good side project.

It seems I am having some issues with minidlna, when I type "apt-get install minidlna" I get an error "E:/unable to locate package minidlna"