samba

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.

I have many computers I need to connect to from my Linux box. Network browsing works, but is terribly slow, so I want to create some shortcuts, that I can mount with a single mouseclick what I need from a list. First I thought to modify the fstab and put there entries that would allow me to easily mount smb shares as a normal user. E.g.:

//paula/michael /media/smbmounts smbfs noauto,user,credentials=/home/jeltsch/.smbpasswd1 0 0

First I added a symbolic link to /etc/init.d/rc5.d/:

cd /etc/init.d/rc5.d sudo ln -s ../autofs S21autofs

Then I added to the /etc/auto.master the following line:

/media/automounts /etc/auto.smbmounts

Then I created the file auto.smbmounts with the following content:

michael_msbl.helsinki.fi -fstype=smbfs,username=michael,password=## ://paula/michael

Then I created the mountpoint:

sudo mkdir /media/automounts/michael_msbl.helsinki.fi

Then I activated the autofs daemon: