G'day,
i just set up a samba share manually on my FC4 box so i can access it from my XP laptop and friends desktop all on our LAN. When i access it i get the "The network path was not found" error in XP. The smb.conf file is as follows :

The computer shows up in the Mshome in my network places on xp however i get the good old cannot access error ( why can windows implement more accurate and specific debugs ?? ) Any ideas onn how i can solve it ? i have started and restarted the samba server many times without any success. alos, when i try "smbclient -L localhost" and enter my user passwd is says "tree connect failed: Call returned zero bytes (EOF)" does that have anything to do with anything ??

Get rid of these lines in "Global"


encrypt passwords = yes
smb passwd file = /etc/samba/smbpasswd


You security level is "share" so why even use encryption or for that matter smbpasswd

hostname lookups = no

Encrypted passwords are on by default in Samba and XP uses them, so no reason to take that out. Also security=share means that each share is tied to a password, although authentication will probably still "ask" for a username/password pair. For this to work I belive Samba needs to know a valid user accout to use as the guest account, search for the term, "guest account" in the man page for smb.conf for further details.

well, i tried what doublejoon mentioned and no change. i then tried what Darin suggested and same thing ( yes i did restart samba after chengin the config file :P )

abt the valid user name, i heard that i should change my XP user name and password to that used by samba which i did but still there was no change ( used "smbpasswd -a windows_usr_name" ). No clue what to do next.

On a side note, what if i try getting a friend using suse to connect to my share. how would he do it ? in nautilus under networks all we see is Windows share and there is nothing inside it.

thanx.

Have you tried accessing the samba share by typing the following in the address bar of Windows Explorer: \\IPaddressofyourLinuxBox\sharename

I sometimes find that for whatever reason sometimes the windows box can't resolve the name of my linux box.

well, i tried "\\192.168.0.1\Gama_wing" and then it asks me for a user name and password ! i thought i had dissabled that by making this a share.. anyhow i had created the user/pass already so i tried that but nothing worked.any ideas ?

it would also be great if i can see my windows shares on my desktop, i dont mind if i have to do 1 way comunication all the time. how can i do that ? in nautilus there is a network icon. how can i configure its URL to point towards the windows workgroup "MSHOME" ??

Hmmm, it asked for a userid and password.....well lets start from the beginning....

If I were you I'd go ahead and setup samba for user level security. Most people do it this, I do it this way and this is what I know.

Next, what are the userid's and passwords you use to log into your windows box(s)? Create those user ids and passwords on you linux box and then again in samba. Now everyone should have a home directory.

Next, this Gama_wing share, did you define it in /etc/samba/smb.conf? It needs a section:
[gama_wing]
comment = whatever
path=/some/directory
writable=yes
guest ok=yes

Next chmod 777 /some/directory

Try to access it from windows.