[SWLUG] HELP for the terminally brain dead

[Tony Pursell]

On 12 Mar 2005 at 19:17, Justin Mitchell wrote:

> On Sat, 2005-03-12 at 15:10, Plod wrote:
> > I have tried and tried to set the Linux box as a server and provide
> > hard drive access to the windows PC for archiving etc, and to access
> > the windows pcs from the Linux box.  But every how to I follow does
> > not work.  Am I doing something wrong?  Probably!  Do I have a clue
> > what it is?  NO!
> 
> seeing windows disks from linux is achieved using smbmount or
> smbclient, i think you should also be able to see windows shares using
> nautilus (the gnome file manager) or whatever the kde one is, in the
> 'Network' section there should be a 'Windows Network' section showing
> any smb shares it managed to find.  assumiung they are shared using
> tcp/ip not anything else strange, and that any firewalls you have dont
> block the ports 137/138/139 i think it was.
> 
> 
> > Maybe SAMBA doesn't run from the start?  Although I am sure that I
> > said it should when I set the machine up.  Perhaps the firewall is
> > blocking any accesses?  Err possible, but I have searched and
> > searched in Mandrake and cannot find a way of controlling it.  I can
> > find the on and off, I think, although nothing seems to change when
> > I do it!
> 
> for serving disk space from the linux machine for the windows machines
> to see, then yes samba is the most obvious way to do it.
> 
> to see if its running look in the output of 'ps aux' for smbd and
> nmbd, those are the main daemon processes that samba runs. the usual
> way to configure samba is by editing the /etc/smb.conf file, but samba
> isnt the easiest thing to tweak as microsoft have changed their
> protocol numerous times over tha ages, so you need to read the
> documentation carefully to make sure you set it up correctly for the
> type of windows your using.
> 
> if you just want to have one or two areas of disk space be accessible
> to the windows machines, and not each users home directories, then you
> could try using WebDAV. This is a feature of the apache webserver, its
> not terribly hard to configure, and Should Just Work in windows where
> it will appear as a 'web folder.
> 

When I had a (unsucessful) go at Samba on my old Debian setup (I use 
Ubuntu now) I think it came down to having logins with passwords on 
the Windows PC.  As my wife wouldn't thank me for making her have to 
logon to her ME machine just for me to prove a point, that is where I 
gave up on Samba.  (I believe that you have to logon to XP whether 
you like it or not...so if you PCs are XP, the answer could lie 
elsewhere.)

As Justin said - you have to slog through the manual.  

Tony