I am having trouble accessing samba shares on my Caldera Linux box from Win98se. I followed the instructions in the install guide exactly. They step you through creating a samba password file. and using the default smb.conf file.

I can see the linux machine in the Network Neighborhood and the connection even works using "net use" It seems to find it OK, but continually askes me for a password. I have my win login exactly the same login and password on both machines. I cannot get past it asking me for the password.

My network consists of one Caldera Linux machine, One Win98 desktop & 1 win98 laptop.

Any Suggestions?

Thanks,

Paul LaBrier

You are may not be mapping your windows users to linux user names correctly. The other problem is that you may not be using encrypted passwords on the Linux side while Windows may expect encrypted passwords.

Go to:
http://ctdp.tripod.com/os/linux/usersguide/index.html and read item 38 about Samba.
There is a section near the bottom titled "Common Pitfalls" that describes how to troubleshoot some problems and check your log files.

Please let me know if this helps you.

The suggestions ofered helped a lot. I can now access the shares IF I am logged into my win32 clients as root. I cannot get it to work if I log in using my normal account, pml. I can log into Windows & Linux using it but I must still have something wrong in the conf.

Paul

Try logging in with your normal account and then read the log files in the /var/log/samba directory. It may give you some idea what the problem is. It should tell you what user you are trying to map to.

Windows 98 doesn't process the password as plain text, so it's not sending the right thing to Samba. You have to add this change to the registry to have windows process the passwords as plain text:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\VNETSUP]
"EnablePlainTextPassword"=hex:01,00,00,00

You can add this to the registry by copying and pasting the three lines into notepad, then save it as a file with the *.reg extention. Then execute it. After adding this to the registry reboot the machine. Samba should now accept your passwords.

-- L. James

Clear text passwords are always a bad security idea. You are better off to continue with the line "encrypt passwords = yes" in the /etc/smb.conf file. If you can already log in while logged on as root on other clients, then clear text vs encrypted passwords is not the problem. If you are still having the problem with logins from win32 clients while not logged in as root, after attempting a login, check your log files in the /var/log/samba directory. You are probably not mapping user names correctly. The log files will tell you what names you are sending. See the "Commmon Pitfalls" section at the URL I quoted earlier.

ehh.. if you don´t think so much about security, i would be "easy" setting it up to sharing.
if you look in you smb.conf a shared folder looks like this
e.g
[Folder]
comment = Files
path =/somwhere/whatever
guest ok = yes
writable = no

the option guest ok = yes allows people to log into your comp. without password
however there is more, under [global] you have to add the line

security = share

then you linux box won´t prompt for password at all, but needles to say it gives you security problems

regards Torp