Samba problems - browsing resolved

[Anne Wilson]

On Monday 13 February 2006 16:06, Claude Jones wrote:
> On Mon February 13 2006 10:32 am, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > I'm still not sure why it wasn't working, since testparm seemed happy
> > enough, but I went ahead and defined a few shared directories, and now
> > everything is working correctly.  Most odd!  I had thought to get 'homes'
> > working first, then add things in later.
>
> I've found Samba, as implemented in Fedora, to be one of the most daunting
> aspects of the distro. Having used PCLinuxOS (a Mandrake derivative), and
> MEPIS (a debian derivative), I find it strange that Fedora hasn't addressed
> this. The documentation is at best confusing - I've even printed out the
> entire 1100 page Samba manual. Things don't work as described, you do
> something, seemingly the same way a dozen times, and then, on the next try,
> it works. It's just too damned hard - I hope the issue gets addressed. I
> was supposed to post a RFE for feature enhancement, but I never got around
> to it. With MEPIS and PCLinuxOS, Samba just works. In PCLinuxOS you turn it
> on with a simple interface that asks you a few questions and you're done.
> With MEPIS, it comes up working - if you install to a machine on a Windows
> network, when you reboot, you see the network. Perhaps there are security
> concerns, but, these should be addressed, and the whole process simplified.
> I've seen many threads such as this over the past 20 months on this list,
> so this is not just me...
>
Actually, when I first implemented Samba I couldn't get it to work by using 
any of the GUI tools.  In the end someone helped me off-list to edit my 
smb.conf.  I had no more problem then, until the version of Mandrake that 
moved from samba2 to samba3, when suddenly some things didn't work properly 
and no-one seemed to know why.  Eventually I got them sorted, but as you 
remark, it was a case where I never really knew what changed.

In this case I found an archived copy of my old smb.conf and edited the new 
one.  Most of the changes I made didn't seem significant, the one exception 
being changing the security setting from 'share' to 'user'.  Perhaps someone 
will see this and realise/explain the significance of that in this context.

Over the years I've relied heavily on the O'Reilly Using Samba book.  The 
newer ones are heavily biased towards larger corporate settings, or at least 
the ones I've seen have been.

Anne