Samba won't dance [Solved - sort of]

[Todd Denniston]

Claude Jones wrote, On 04/17/2008 08:22 AM:
> On Mon April 14 2008, Claude Jones wrote:
>> It's no longer funny
>>
>> Each release, I hope things improve...they don't
<SNIP>
> 
> I can't declare victory. I am now networked, but, I don't feel like I know 
> much more about why than I did before. For example, sometime during the 
> period after solving the problem of one of my machines on the lan not 
> responding to pings, even though it was being elected as the master browser!, 
> things started to fall into place - but it was inconsistent. One moment, all 
> machines were seeing each other, I was able to print from my Windows 
> computers to the printer that was attached to my Fedora box - I could browse 
> shares in both directions, etc. -- then, suddenly, the connection would be 
> lost. I discovered that turning off my firewall on the Fedora box would fix 
> that; I pored through my rules over and over, but, nothing made sense -- and 
> the strange thing was, after getting things going by turning off the firewall 
> (there's always that Samba delay before everything settles in), I could then 
> turn the firewall back on, and things would work for long periods of time, 
> till again, the connection was broken. Turning off the firewall would restore 
> connections instantaneously - turning it back on after some time, would again 
> result in functionality for extended periods - I'm talking many minutes of 
> time, here. Another strange thing, in Samba, one of the defaults if you 
> choose to add a share is to share "All home directories", but, that would 
> share my entire file system, everything from / on down... That was one thing 
> I changed last night. Last night, I turned the firewall on before turning in. 
> This morning, I find that everything is functioning - I can browse all 
> machines, I can print, etc -- so, it's been up for 8 hours or so now, which 
> is longer than it lasted before... I can't declare victory because I don't 
> have a clue what fixed it - and that's the way it always goes for me with 
> Fedora and Samba -- 
> 
> This is not about ranting against Fedora. Fedora is my preferred distro for 
> many reasons, and I've tried at least 50, some for extended periods. But, I 
> really believe this is one aspect of the distro that needs to improve. I wish 
> I could say how, but, the frustrating part is I don't even know what the 
> problem is. Read this whole thread, if you care to, before commenting - the 
> experiment I conducted with the PCLinuxOS live cd is something I've done many 
> times with many distros - other distributions have managed to get it right, 
> so "it just works" out of the box -- I'll repeat what I said at the outset of 
> this whole discussion, I'd be fine with an explanation that included "we 
> don't have Samba configured to work right out of the box for the following 
> reasons"; I can accept that there may be security or other considerations for 
> not having it turned on and working, but, if that's the issue, it would be 
> great if someone could explain it. These Samba discussions come up again and 
> again on this list, so it's not just me that's having problems.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who offered help on this problem 
> 


As it seems that turning off the firewall seems to be all that is needed to 
get it going again, then I would suggest doing a tcpdump/wireshark session 
tracking everything between the fedora machine and the machine that is 
refusing to connect...AS you shut off the firewall and until it works again.

Then pore over the dump of data until your eyes bleed. (or at least that's 
what I would have to do... :)

-- 
Todd Denniston
Crane Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC Crane)
Harnessing the Power of Technology for the Warfighter