home networking: easy way?

[Joey Kelley]

Quoting Trevor Smith <trevor at haligonian.com>:

> On October 1, 2004 2:29 pm, Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> > Very easy: after you have configured the shares on the Windows[tm] side
> > open up nautilus (if running Gnome) or the KDE browser (if running KDE)
> > and enter at the direction bar: smb://WIN_MACHINE_NAME. Quickly you will
> > see the available shares the Windows[tm] host offers.
>
> Right. Well, there are many assumptions hidden in your message, and one or
> more of them is not applicable to my case.
>
> 1. Maybe "configured shared on the Windows machine" doesn't mean what I think
> it does. I've gone on the administrator's account on the XP machine and
> follwed the help instructions (created a folder, right-clicked, selected
> "sharing", told it to share the folder on the network)
>
> 2. Maybe something more is needed on my computer. I installed samba (and swat
> and samba-client) on my FC2 machine, via "yum install samba" (and the
> corresponding commands for the other 2). The samba servers seem to start
> (smbd and nmbd are running) and swat works. The XP machine can see me (there
> is a "Samba Server (Trevor)" icon in the My Network Places) but it can not
> connect to me (double clicking on that icon results in a path not found or
> not reachable error or something).
>
> 3. I can't do as you say: smb://ISAAC in a Konqueror window. "Could not
> connect to host for smb://isaac/"
>
> Any ieas about where I should start looking?
>
> --
> Trevor Smith // trevor at haligonian.com
>

Hello All - this might be the blind leading the blind, or the newbie leading the
newbie, but - here goes.
         A little about my network configuration:
         At the moment - Blackhole-  XP SP2
                       - Desktop - Win 98 SE
                       - localhost (fedora) - Fedora FC1
         All are setup on the same workgroup.
         That workgroup is known as Workgroup.
         For a windows machine to see anything, it must be in the same
workgroup, or the machine has to be able to browse multiple workgroups.
         Since Trevor states that he can see the Fedora box from the XP box, the
configuration problem is probably on the Fedora side (at least thats what I
found) Incidently, Trevor, your procedure for sharing a folder in XP is
correct, frankly, if you didn't do that correctly there wouldn't be much hope
:-)
         Since I am running FC1-  your exact procedure may vary - but here goes:
         In Gnome
         Bring up the main menu - Go to System Settings, then Server Settings,
then SAMBA
         Enter Root password if needed.
         This will bring up the SAMBA server config GUI.
         If you don't have a share configured, I doubt the server will work
correctly. I have my /home/joey directory configured for read/write access for
all network users. Additional directories can be added by hitting Add.
          Once a share has been configured, go into Preferences, come down to
Server Settings
          Be absolutely sure that the workgroup is typed exactly as Windoze
wants it - it can be very touchy - also I have a description in place, I assume
that would be optional.
          For a home network, go under the security tab and select the
Authentication mode - set it to Share. As you probably don't care about
encrypting passwords-  set that to no - and set the Guest account to the user
account. Mine is joey
          Click ok.
          Go Back to preferences, go to Users.
          Create a SAMBA user that has the same name as the primary user on the
machine - set the password to the same as well.
          Click OK.
          I did notice that these changes seem to take a few minutes on my PII
to have any effect - I would suggest waiting a few minutes after trying this.
          After a few minutes, you should be able to go into the main menu,
Select Network Servers.
          If you've done your job correctly, the work group will appear in the
window - double click and you should see all of the computers in the workgroup,
including the one you're on.
          For some reason, it takes forever for my Fedora box to access a
Windoze share - not exactly sure why. I think, that it might be my Windows
Firewalling-  I run BlackIce PC protection. After the Fedora box gets access
for the first time, it seems to go faster.
          Hope this helps!
          cya, Joey


--Joey Kelley, Fedora Newbie--
"If David beat Goliath, Linux
should kick Microsofts butt!"