dialin Samba

[Nagy Gabor Peter]

Hi, list!

I hope the thing I am after is easily done or at least well documented.
Somehow I did not find any hint this far.

So I have a Linux box here, running Samba 2.0.7, a LAN with Windows 98
machines, and a modem on the server.

Some users want to dial the server from their Windows laptops when they
are away, and access the samba shares of the server and the clients on
the LAN.

I read through the documentation, and have managed to set things up
so that the client sees the server.

But

To achieve this, in smb.conf I had to add an interfaces line, listing the
IP address of the ppp link. But now, I cannot start nmbd if the link is
not up, because it complains about not being able to bind to the IP.
Using ppp0 instead of the IP address was even worse, it simply did not
work.

I might change the two smb.conf files when some user dials in, and restart
the daemons, but this is not pretty, and I fear it destroys active
connections like file copy from the server, etc.

In smb.conf man page I found PPP mentioned in the section bind interfaces
only:

 Note that you
 should not use this parameter for machines that are
 serving  PPP or other intermittent or non-broadcast
 network interfaces as it will not  cope  with  non-
 permanent interfaces.

That's all the lead I have this far.

The other problem which is a much smaller one, is that I set the dialin
server up, so that it gives a fix IP address to the dialler. I gave the
IP address a name in DNS, but if the laptop thinks its netbios name is
something different, I cannot access it from the server. It works from
the laptop though, and that is the important part.

Regards
Gee(@freemail.hu)