I have been pulling my hair out for days trying to setup up Mepis as a file server on a Win2k network.

None of the GUI tools work, so I've been trying to edit my smb.conf file to no success. I have one share, under /home/data that I want all users on my LAN to be able to see.

I've given up on using my router as a DHCP server, I've read that Samba can't handle that, so I went to static IP and updated my hosts file so that I can now ping by IP or PC name. If I start Smb4k, I see the other PCs, and they can see me in Network Neighborhood, but my Mepis box can't it's own shares in Smb4k and my Windows boxes can't see the shares either.

As I've said, SWAT won't run on my PC, so I can't do things the easy way (of course). Any help would be appreciated.

I would prefer to chuck my smb.conf file and start from scratch using the easy GUI tools, but if we have to edit files, I just want this to work.

post your current smb.conf

I kind of fixed it.

I gutted my smb.conf file and rebooted the machine. Then, I used KDE control center to set up my share. After I did that, my Win2k clients could see, read, and write the share.

My problem came when I shut down my current server running Win98. I had used Smb4k to mount the share from that machine. The Win98 machine is the master for the LAN. When I shut down the machine, smb4k crashed. I rebooted the machine and one of my Win2k clients could browse my share, but read-only. That's where I stand right now.

Somehow, smb4k gets munged up, and I have to close it and restart. The only way I can see to get this LAN setup working is to come in in the morning and boot up machines in a specific order, browse the network in smb4k to make sure Mepis is playing along, then start rebooting Win machines in different orders until it works. Ack!

FYI, my current smb.conf file is:

;*******************section global*****************
[global]

# Do something sensible when Samba crashes: mail the admin a backtrace
workgroup = mwg
security = share

[FILES]
path = /home/files
guest ok = yes
read only = no

OK. The share is really read-only for both clients. The problem is that, in Konqueror, the /home/files directory is set to public read and write, but all subdirectories are set to read-only.

How can I make the subdirectories all follow the permissions of the parent directory?

TIA