[Glastonbury] File and printer sharing

[tim hall]

Hi all,

Right, I've got to the point with the Assembly Rooms network where I'm going 
to need some help. It's taken somewhat longer than I expected, but now I have 
four boxes all networked up, two running Ubuntu Hoary and two running Debian 
Sarge. The network is nicely configured, I can send pings all round and I can 
ssh happily between the Sarge boxes, which is all well and good. The Ubuntu 
machines have all their ports closed as per default. I'm not entirely sure 
how to open them, is that simply a question of starting the relevant service 
from /etc/init.d/ or are they locked down more than that? I might not bother, 
if I don't need to do this.

The Ubuntu clients can see the internet fine through the Debian gateway box, 
now I want to share files and printers. Help please.

I'm trying to configure samba, which I'm doing by playing with the values 
in /etc/samba/smb.conf on each of the boxes. I can see all but one of the 
Ubuntu machines, which I could probably solve by simply copying across the 
smb.conf file, but how? remember, no ssh or anything. I suppose I could do it 
via ftp, but that seems a little daft. However, I can't access the shares on 
any machine. The problem I'm guessing lies with the authentication, this is 
usually where I come unstuck. Does samba use separate username/password 
values to main system? There seem to be so many different authentication 
methods and I'm not sure which are supposed to work together or conflict. 
Does anyone have any good pointers to an explanation of the system written in 
reasonably plain English? I'm beginning to find developer jargon slightly 
tedious, especially when it runs to several pages. ;)

I'm also having similar and I suspect related problems with printer and 
scanner configuration. I keep reading these wonderful reports about how CUPS 
and SANE have made it so much easier and I dread to think what it must have 
been like before they arrived. The device permissions all look right by the 
way and I've added myself to the relevant groups and the printers are 
supported models - I looked them up on linuxprinting.org - I'm stumped.

Any thoughts, advice, suggestions, incantations, bone casting or downright 
dirty hacks would be appreciated at this point.

cheers,

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk