Well, as usual, when I traced the "bug" it had its hands on my keyboard. After downing hardware that was really bad news, I installed a brand new 6.1 Mandrake . Through use of IDE drives and swapping them about, I rid myself of the old 6.4Gb disk I no longer trusted (one partition had 400Mb of bad sectors) and moved everything to new disks. The motherboard continues to complain about no Ultra-66 cable on IDE0 but so what? Net access was a sucess with a simple masquerade setup. Those folk who insist on using windows on the net deserve what they get. I had to interrupt work to recover what I could for some poor fellowl who got hit by explore.zip. His machine is now dual-boot, and windows doesn't know how to access the network. Moreover, he doesn't know his root pasword. I think I have limited his opportunities for self-destruction to an acceptable level. Anyway, I was setting up fileservice. I really don't intend to keep Samba. I just want the windows users to use it to store their .rtff conversions from Claris Works so they can pick them up again from StarOffice using nfs. I had very carefully preserved the three partitions /home /home/share/mac and /home/share/win though I had moved them all to a single 8Gb /home partition in the new system. OK... I put in the hosts, since I am not using dhcp. Then I put in the users. I used linuxconf for this since it had the feature. I thought it was a nice touch that it recognized each old user's home directory and asked if it should change ownership, or change ownership recursively to the new user number. Man, I was so impressed, having done this by hand so many times..... Next was sendmail configuration. Linuxconf with its neat little screwdriver icon let me set it up quickly and with only one edit. (trynullMX). I was feeling really good about Linuxconf. Now, where was my checklist? I had put in each host, and double-checked the IPs and the nicknames. I had put in each user and logged in with the user's pw on the main machine to make certain it dcould be done. I knes linuxconf had done the ownerships for me so I went on to Samba "Share not found" "Access denied" "Password incorrect" Hmpf. OK lets make a table of all the possible settings for Samba to run and proceed through them methodically... Right? After reading the documentation and figuring it SHOULD work, obviously we're missing something. SO this is done. Well, maybe linuxconf despite its shiny new skin is not all we joped for..... Manual samba configuration file.... Now Tom at mandrakeuser.org has a wonderful section for the beginner, and with all the changes to Samba, I was sure that is exactly what I was. And, to my amazement, my had configuration resembled his quite closely. Still cycling "share not found", "Access denied" "Password incorrect" I have everybody set to plain text passwords... What can it be? This is day 3 of the Great Samba effort and I am thinking of a giant "free-for-all" share everyone can write to just to get past windows, so I can set up nfs for linux and never be concerned again. Then I right-clicked, quite by accident, on one of the errant directories. Properties Hmmmm Owner: root Group: root Oh Color linuxconf not quite ready for prime time as an admin tool, but still darned useful. Color my face very red. I think I will make my checklist and stick to it next time, no matter how temporary the plans are. Samba works like a treat, of course. Once the ownerships were configured properly, the problem vanished. Civileme
