Re: tlug: You mean I'm not the only Samba flunkie...

[Jonathan Byrne - 3Web <jq@example.com>]

On Sat, 30 May 1998, Sean Bennett wrote:

> Yokatta!  there are others who haven't figured out Samba either (no offence) - and
> I thought it was just because I'm a newbie....

No, it's not just you.  Samba is a pain in the butt.  It provides NT
Server services and it does a good job, but it certainly doesn't provide
them with the ease of configuration that NT does.  After I got it set up,
I later discovered some graphical front ends for it that look good, but
I've never tried them.  Now that I have it working and have a little
confidence, they aren't as necessary.  Ain't it always like that on UNIX
:-) ?

The post of that was replied to earlier was actually really old(early April), so I
guess he was digging around in some back archives.  I did get it working,
but I'm always happy to see more info come out.  Back then, lots of people
posted lots of advice and good examples from their smb.conf files that
really got me on the right track.  I'd read the man page and the inline
comments in smb.conf, but was still kind of in the dark.  The docs make a
lot more sense *after* you understand what you need to do :-)

> I celebrated a small victory when I had first gotten my SambaServer to show up on
> my W95's network neighborhood, only to be asked for a password for access.... '*a
> password??*  I don't remember configuring any passwords...'

This is the one that really gets you, and I was hung up in the same place.
I have my samba configured for guest=share, and you also need a guest ID,
so I made my smbguest.   But guess what you have to do?  Unlike making
something share on a Windows machine, where that's all there is to it
(public means '%&#(&! public!),  I had to make a userid called smbguest
under Linux!  I never noticed this in any docs, but somebody told me about
it.  That did the trick.  smbguest has a disabled password so that no one
can log in using that ID, and I also deleted the smbguest home directory.
I don't know if that's strictly necessary to do that or not, but on the
other hand, neither is there a need for smbguest to have a directory.

If you run with share=user, however, anyone who wants to get samba access
to your machine will in fact need a valid userid and password on your
Linux system.

On my machine, the only two directories that are accessible on the network
are one called public-upload and another one called public-download, and
they are there for people who need to put files on my machine for me to
edit, or who need to get files that are kept on my machine. 

If you like, I'll post the relevant parts of my smb.conf file that do
these things.

I hope this helps,

Jonathan

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