Samba/Swat with Red Hat 7.1

[Rob F.]

Hi,

I am trying to add a linux box to an existing windows network. All boxes ping each other, however I am having a bear of a time getting them to recognize each other.

For a brief moment, the linux box showed up in windows network neighborhood, but disappeared..ugh.

Then when I run 'smbclient -L' ONE of the windows pcs used to show up, but now doesn't.

Anyway, the instructions for running SWAT seem a little ambiguous and I can't run LINUXCONFIG among other things.

A only have WWW Server installed. Should I install Gnome and go through the GUI configuration?

Any dumbed down instructions/advice would be appreciated very much.

Thanks,
Robin :)
_

[ltrain]

What distro - version?

I do not want to overstate the obvious but did you read the NHF? It is very good and pretty clear on howto get a "basic" samba file to work. I've never configured samba using swat - I would suggest configuring samba from the smb.conf file. After configuring and you have ensured both smb and nmb processes have started run testparm. If it complains go to your log files (usually.../var/log/samba/*.log) and see what errors it is reporting back. This will give you a starting point.

You can also check www.samba.org (http://www.samba.org) for more information. Hope this helps.

[Rob F.]

Hi Itrain,

I am using Red Hat 7.1 and I think thats why the NHF is not helping as much.

I copied the smb.conf file from the NHF and followed all directions verbatim to no avail.

Testparm runs okay and Samba starts without problems, but when I run ifconfig, it says no network interfaces found, and the linux box doesn't show up in Windows network neighborhood (but it did for a while, I don't know what the hell happened). Any ideas???

I appreciate your help :)
Robin ;)

[ltrain]

If your system isn't reporting back an interface then you must first tackle this problem first. Since I have never run into this particular problem (nic missing) I am not of very much use here...

1) You can use ifconfig to add an ethernet interface to your system but -- I am concerned as to why your NIC isn't atleast reporting back a loopback adapter = 127.0.0.1. What type of adapter are you using? Judging from your first post: -- was working now it isn't -- the system was able to recognize the card at one time. Just to be sure your card works with RH you can check the HAL on red hat's website.

Once you get the NIC problem worked out you can begin getting samba working.

[Homer J Simpson]

SWAT is easy to use once you have got it up and running. Keep trying! I am pretty much a n00bie too, and i installed 6.2, upgraded to latest version of SAMBA and apache, no problems! I would suggest getting RedHat 7.0 Bible. I have 6.2 bible and i have seen 7.0 Bible, 7.0 is very detailed, and is VERY helpful!

[GonzoJohn]

Perhaps a little more info would help.

On your Windows network, do you have an NT Primary Domain Controller, a gateway or what? Are you using DHCP or static IPs? Are you just using Windows Networking (I assume so) and if so, how are you logging in? To a Windows Workgroup or the NT Domian controller?

Also on your Linux machine, a couple of things. First, how are you loading the Samba server daemons smbd and nmbd? At boot up? From a script? manually?

Second, if you make sure that server daemons are running, run

smbclient -L localhost

This will tell you what shares are available from the Linux machine.

Hope this helps a bit.

[Rob F.]

Hi Guys,

Itrain...I was wrong earlier, when I run ifconfig, everything is fine.

GonzoJohn...I am using windows networking and logging into a windows network. I also am using static ips.

I started the daemons manually (although I'll try to run the daemons from the system startup scripts later.)

When I run 'smbclient -N localhost' nothing shows up. It did recognize one of the windows boxes at one time, but it doesn't anymore.

I have been experimenting so much its hard to say what is wrong.

Homer...I will look for it. I need something better than what I have.

As always, any info would be appreciated!
Robin ;) Homer

[Tweaki1]

Rob,

I got the same problems installing Samba on RH7.1.
However, I found out that the loopback device (lo0) doesn't work properly. When I did a smbclient -L hostname (my linuxbox) I got back something like: rout to host not found. If I tried pinging 127.0.0.1 I got the same thing. When I issued ifconfig the loopback device doesn't show up. Thus Samba can't reach the localhost, so it can't get to the file system. On remote machine (windows) the Netbios name showed up if I typed \\Linux_netbios_name but I got back an error message about not being able to find the host or something.

Restarting the network (/etc/init.d/network restart) showe that the lo initialization was delayed. Netcfg showed the lo interface as deactivated. Activating it didn't work.
Working my way through the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts dir didn't shed any light whatsoever. The Network Administration Guide (nag) couldn't help.
It appears that something's wrong with the out-of-the-box rh7.1 kernel and it all seems quit hopeless for a newbie like me.

Since I don't know how to enable the lo interface, I'm gonna try to recompile a kernel and see what that does...

Let me know if you got anything new...
Tweaki.

(ps. in your latest post you mention you did a smbclient -N localhost; should be -L)

[ltrain]

So Rob, what's the status? Are you able to get the interfaces working? Did you check with RH to see if your hardware is compatible with the OS? Can you ping the loopback adapter? If so can you ping the internal IP address? If so can you ping the external IP address of the Windoze box?