[Glastonbury] File and printer sharing

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 07:54:05PM +0100, tim hall wrote:
> 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.
> 
Try using dpkg-reconfigure ssh on them and run the server? It may be 
that they've only got the ssh client on by default.

> 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. ;)
> 
SWAT - the Samba Web Admin tool is a deity-send here. If one of the 
machines has apache running, install swat then point your browser at the 
appropriate port and you get a nice Web front end. [Can't remember the
port off-hand but it'll be in the docs for swat in /usr/share/doc :) ]

> 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.
> 
CUPS too has a web front end which I use by default [I notice that the 
some machines at work run Apache _just_ to be able to run the CUPS web
front end :) ] Don't know about SANE - Martin ???

> Any thoughts, advice, suggestions, incantations, bone casting or downright 
> dirty hacks would be appreciated at this point.
> 
> cheers,
> 
> tim hall
> http://glastonburymusic.org.uk
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Glastonbury Linux User Group mailing list
> Glastonbury at mailman.lug.org.uk
> http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/glastonbury
> 
> User group website: http://www.lugog.org.uk/