Failing to set up samba

[lindahl]

I have been trying for a few frustrating days to set up my linux box with samba shares.

I run RedHat 7.3 on a PIII system.

I have searched throuth this forum and read all threads related to this problem and tried all suggested solutions without sucess.

Currently my smb.conf looks like this:

[global]
security = SHARE

[homes]
guest ok = Yes

And I get the following error message:

\\share\user

No Service is operating at the destination network endpoint on othe remote system.

I am testing it on a win2k machine on the same network.
I entered "\\share\user" from the "Run".
share is equal to the hostname of the linux box and user is equal to an existing user on the box.

I used the following command to start the samba daemons:
"/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb start"

The samba installation has not been modified apart from changing smb.conf forth and back before settling on what is precented above.

Any help is appreciated!!

[froggy3132000]

wins support or wins server ip address?
What is the error message?

[cowanrl]

The first thing you need to check, if you haven't already, is to be sure you have IP connectivity between your Win2k and Linux machine. Can you ping the Win2k machine from the Linux machine and vice versa?

Then, you need to be sure you haven't set up a firewall on the Red Hat machine that will block SMB traffic from the Win2k machine. If you accept the firewall defaults when you installed RH 7.3, your firewall will be be blocking the traffic. You need to disable or relax the settings on the firewall. This is the #1 cause of problems with Samba.

Once you make sure those aren't an issue, you can then start checking Samba. To be sure Samba is running properly, enter this command on the Linux machine:

smbclient -L localhost -N

It should respond with a message that says what shares you have, what your server and workgroup names are. If you get an error message, then Samba isn't running properly.

The security model you have selected with security = share is very simple. You don't have to create any users on your Linux system. Of course, it doesn't provide any security either.
The homes share is designed to share out the users home directory on the Samba server when they log in. If you don't have any users created, there won't be any shares. I don't think the homes share is appropriate for a security = share security model.
I suggest you create a directory and share it out separately. You can give all users read only or read/write access to it. The users who connect to it won't need to authenticate to your Samba server at all.

Here's how I create a shared directory for all to use when using security = share. These commands should be executed as root.

Create the directory with this command:

mkdir /public

Give everyone read/write access to the filesystem with this command:

chmod 777 /public

Now add these lines to your smb.conf file:

[public]
path = /public
guest ok = yes
writeable = yes

and restart Samba.

Everyone will have read/write access to the public share. If you want them to have read only access, replace the writeable = yes line to read only = yes.

This should at least get you going with Samba.