Samba trouble (smb, smbadduser, smbpasswd)
If your samba is unreliable, there can be a number of reasons. I got the impression that YAST overwrites configuration data you have manually edited (e.g. in the password and user files) when you try to change settings via the YAST samba setup procedure. Here follows a checklist in case samba is again not responding or not visible in the network neighborhood. It could be that the unreliability is due to a PDC shutting down. Maybe I should make my Linux the PDC as it is always running. Anyway even if I manage to connect from W2K (using map network drive) I couldn't connect from W98 by clicking the visible icon of my computer in the MCBL workgroup ("network path not found"). And in MacOSX my computer was not visible at all (but I could connect via the manual command "smb://128.214.186.42/homes"). Strange...
In /etc/samba/smb.conf:
- "netbios name = Michael"
- "workgroup = MCBL"
- Check that ports 135, 137, 138, 139 and 445 of the firewall are open (both udp and tcp). In Suse 9 (KDE) the network browsing additionally needs port 7741 (according to some post in a discussion group). However, even with those open ports the mounting of smb shares during system startup (or manually later on) doesn't succeed. Also the browsing of the LAN doesn't work despite those open ports. When I switch of the firewall entirely (via YAST), everything works fine again. That YAST is really a bad interface to the firewall (why can't Suse put instead something like "Brickwall" for MacOS X????).
- Set user and password newly:
smbadduser jeltsch:jeltsch smbpasswd jeltsch - Restart the smb and nmb daemons:
/etc/init.d/smb restart /etc/init.d/smb restart - After updating to Suse 9.1 the smbadduser command disappeared and the way to add users is:
smbpasswd -a username