Samba won't dance [Solved - sort of]

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 09:39 -0400, Todd Denniston wrote:
> 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... :)
----
or open ports 137 & 138 because that would be significantly easier and
according to his firewall listing...they aren't open.

Craig