samba

[zerocool1]

I'm using suse 9.0, I'm trying to figure out how to use samba server properly. on windows computer it lets me see which directories are shared but doesn't let me access them. then it prompts for a username and password, Any ideas. either that or I set up tftp which also I don't know how to set up.

 

[ITJunkie]

Go Here for all the info you need on Samba.

Do you have user accounts setup on suse for accessing via samba? You will need to do that unless you just want people to connect as guest(?), I think.

 

[jose]

create some users on your samba server. First linux users then add some samba users. Then change the password of the samba users w/ "smbpasswd", have the passwords match the windows login password. Then everything will be fine. You can use webmin to configure your linux box. You'll need to download it and install it.

Regards,
Jose

 

[howdyduty]

www.samba.org is good stuff

 

[zerocool1]

I don't have the option on the yast control center samba server to create users. Jose, if I do what you're saying that would mean that the person would login into my computer on boot?

 

[drag]

Times like this makes wish I knew more about how Samba works.


Samba keeps seperate users and passwords from the regular Unix users in Linux. So you don't nessicarally have to setup a login user for each user you want to have thru Samba, but often people do that for convienence because then they can setup home directories for everybody. Or maybe you at least have to have a guest account. I am not sure, but from the unix-end there is plenty of ways to disable logins for users if you don't want them to log it. Deleting their passwords from the /etc/passwd and/or /etc/shadow is a good way for doing that. You can su into that user (su guest) but that disables all logins that require passwords (ftp, ssh, telnet, login etc etc) Basicly you turn drag:asdfwer1203:1000:1000rag sidious,,,:/home/drag:/bin/bash into
drag::1000:1000rag sidious,,,:/home/drag:/bin/bash. The password stuff maybe a X to indicate shadowed passwords.

Windows thru the years have actually had several different versions of "file and print sharing" and netbuie stuff. W2k and later try to use encrypted passwords for "security", but will fall back to plain text passwords if that doesn't work. But this can cause problems when using older windows oses to try to access w2k+ or samba shares.

I found a document here to show how to setup a guest account in samba, but I don't know how accurate it is, Samba had a big revision when it upgraded to version 3.x But hopefully it can provide enough information to get you started, I'd check out Samba.org or one of it's mirrors for exact details.

Personally I just use webmin when setting up shares. It's a web based configuration tool for setting up your system and has good Samba plugins. A suprisingly large amount of distros supply it turned on by default. Mandrake is one of them, but maybe Suse depends more heavily on Yast, I don't know. I've had good luck with it, a couple times I had to fall back to editing the actual text configuration for samba, though. Either way you can install it on most anything if you want, it's a nice general gui configuration tool for Linux.

best bet though is to look thru Samba yourself for the definative answer. it's best to know a little bit how it works, so you know you set it up securely Even for windows stuff it's nice to know how it works. It's a nice little cracker trick on unsecure lans to mess with the server's ports in some way to distrupt the encrypted logins to file servers so the windows clients automaticly fall back on plain text passwords that are easy sniff. (Or something like that anyways.)