windows cannot read linux's shared folder
 

On my home network, when I first set things up, my windows computer was able to "see" my Linux computer and read the publicly shared folder.

Now it cannot read it at all. When I click on the directory from Windows, it tells me that it is not accessible and does not have permission.

I checked the folder in question on the Linux computer and the "Shared" tab is all *greyed* out and the "Not Shared" has been selected. How do I change this so that the Windows computer can read that public folder again?

I did have KDE 3.4.2 but now I have KDE 3.5.6 on SuSE 10.0.

You using samba right?

What does the samba config file look like?

If you want a share to be publicly accessible by all computer on the network, it needs to look something like this:

smb.conf:

Mine looks different:
I want the Windows machines to be able to read and copy from but not move from or write to the shared folder.

I'm using YaST to edit the Samba config file.

Something like this then:

I edited it using a text editor and before I did that, I copied smb.conf to a backup (smb.conf.old) and then added what you said. I did not know how to issue a command for Samba to restart (I guessed that it might be necessary) so I rebooted the computer.

Unfortunately, Windows XP still cannot read the shared public folder. When I view the folder's properties in Konquerer, the Shared part is still greyed out.

if your trying to make it so that anyone on your network can access this share make the following change
change to if you only want certain users to be able to access the share then you need to add samba users

oh yes, and "security = share", i seem to overlooked that :)

I just tried that and Windows still can't find my Linux computer. I still get that "the computer is unavailable" and "you don't have permission to access this computer" messages.

I'm beginning to wonder if this is not due to some security update somewhere?

Like I said, the Linux computer does not show up on the home network when viewing from the Windows XP computer but Samba has no problem with viewing and transferring files from the Windows computer to the Linux computer.

I still don't understand why when viewing the Public folder in Konquerer, the contents of the "Share" tab are greyed out and, like I said, the public folder is checked off as "Not Shared".

What are the permissions on the public folder itself?

Owner: Can View & Modify Content
Group: Can View
Others: Can view

Ownership: <me>
Group: Users

drwxr-xr-x

I have also just noticed you don't have "netbios name = <computer name>" in your config file - Thats probably why windows can't see linux.

Which computer's name should I put in for the netbios? Linux or the Windows? Anything else?

Anything you like - but its the name that will be seen by clients connecting to your samba server (so basically whatever name you want to call linux in the network)

Do I have to restart Samba or anything to see the changes take effect? If so, how do I do that?

Samba should re-check the config file every minute, but to do it manually :