FW: [Samba] Newbie Help

Sat Jul 6 07:49:02 GMT 2002

I guess you are in what I think of as "Newbie Hell."  It sounds like you
are learning linux like a lot of people, all by yourself.  That's how I
did it, and it is maddening and worse, very time consuming. The important
thing is not to keep hitting your head against the brick wall over
and over.

So, what to do.

First, I would join a linux email support group. I belong to a very good
one. This is the address of one of its mirrow sites:
http://linux-sxs.org/index2.html
The address below is where to sign up for the email list.
http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
Be prepared to help as well as get help. This is all free and voluntary.

Second, about that documentation. Have you started from stratch, bought a
linux for dummies book (I did) and just read through it? I now own, I blush
to say it, about 25 books on linux/unix. I have bought books costing 30-50 bucks
which I needed to answer just a small a number of questions, in retrospect.
But setting up a a web site, mail server, a network, printing services, etc
all gets rather involved. In the end, you only have to know a few dozen
tricks, but, you have to know them. I am still far from expert after about 4
years of doing linux. This reflects the fact that I am a home user, and have
no human experts handy to fix problems.

But, those books are stil great trouble shooting devices. The books that sit
by my desk all the time though are Linux in a nutshell by Jessica Hekman from
O'Reilly. And, the Learning the Bash Shell by Cameron Newham & Bill
Rosenblatt. And, for the hardcore (and those without a GUI), Learning
the Vi editor by Linda Lamba and Arnold Robbins, also from O'Reilly.

You have to learn enuf about linux to bypass all the distribution specific
configuration GUI's. They only work some of the time, and you don't want to
be helplessly tied to one distro. You'll never feel comfortable with running
a linux system (as opposed to just using one) if you depend on GUI's. The
real power of linux comes from understanding bash scripts

Now, enough of this talk. Back to your problem.

Obviously, you have a network problem. So, you will need to be able to
trouble shoot a network. I bought two books specifically on this topic alone.
Here is how I would do it:
1. Can you ping other computers on your network? If not, your client is
misconfigured.
2. If you can ping others computers, but not your server:
a. Did you ping by name or ip number?
  1. If ip number works but name fails, this is a simple problem of name
resolution.
  2. If both fail, then the Redhat server is misconfigured.

If #1a is the problem, then that means that your computer has no way of
finding the ip number of your server just using its name. The simplest
way, which will work only for the client you are on, is to add this to your
/etc/hosts file on your client:

192.168.0.2 hammer2.jhammer.org hammer2 <---Use your ip number and domain
name.

#===========================================================================

207.18.126.2 helix cyber.helix.org helix.org <--put your samba server here

(Note: Neither of these entries is a real internet address!)

If #2a is the problem, then post back. 

The following is just a description of an extreme means of finding
information on a linux system, assuming you have already tried 
man ipfwadm
and gotten no information.

ipfwadm is a bit dated, but you are using on old version of redhat.
I don't want to give you wrong information.  I do have ipfwadm on my
system, but don't use it. However, you can get information about this
even if you have no documentation for it. Try, as root:

locate ipfwadm (This assumes that updatedb has been run on your machine).
/mnt/hda4/usr/man/man8/ipfwadm-wrapper.8.gz
/sbin/ipfwadm
/sbin/ipfwadm-wrapper               

Then, try:
file /sbin/ipfwadm
/sbin/ipfwadm: symbolic link to /sbin/ipfwadm-wrapper
No help. So try:

file /sbin/ipfwadm-wrapper
/sbin/ipfwadm-wrapper: Bourne-Again shell script text

That's more like it. A Bash script.

If you open the script in a word processor, and the hardcore like vi the
best (IMHO), you will see this on line 35:

35 if [ -n "$DEBUG_IPFWADM" ]; then IPCHAINS=print_ipchains;
36 else IPCHAINS=/sbin/ipchains;
37 fi            

Note: The line numbers appear in vi only if you use the set nu option.

Now, that's more like it. ipfwadm is just a front end for ipchains.
Now we're smoking.
man ipchains 
will give you a wealth of information.
To make a long story finally end, I would use:
ipchains -L to see what rules you have set up.
If you can't read them because of wrap around, 
ipchains -L > junk
and then use vi to read junk
use the set nowrap option to avoid wrapping the lines.
If you just want to hope for the best, you can remove all rules with:
ipchains -F
You will still be left with policies, which hopefully will be permissive.
If not, study man ipchains.

Joel

On Fri, Jul 05, 2002 at 03:54:36PM -0600, Donald D. Henson wrote:
> (Note the change of e-mail address. Please use <linuxtest at wepin.com>)
> 
> I must admit that I'm getting a bit frustrated here. After finally
> locating the DIAGNOSIS.txt file, I did as you suggested and started
> running through the tests. Sure enough, Test # 2 failed and told me
> there are two possibilities: 1) DNS or /etc/hosts file is not set up
> properly or 2) I need to relax the firewall rules. It even told me to
> use a program named "ipfwadm" to make the changes. This is where the
> frustration started to get really bad.
> 
> I looked through the Red Hat documentation on how to set up the
> /etc/hosts file. (I don't have a DNS.) I haven't been able to find any
> reference to /etc/hosts file. (But I bet it's in there somewhere.)
> 
> I then decided to try to set up the firewall rules as suggested. There
> doesn't appear to be a program named "ipfwadm". Back to the Red Hat
> docs. They said to use "GNOME Lokkit". Again, that program is apparently
> not available. The docs said I could use a text version, lokkit. That
> program ran but I was unable to go to the second screen and my attempt
> to just turn off the firewall using "lokkit" failed.
> 
> My frustration is not so much with Samba as it is with all the Linux
> documentation I've seen to date. The docs are all over the place, they
> assume extensive knowledge of Linux, and no concessions are made for
> people, like me, who are trying to understand all this stuff.
> 
> Well, if by this point I haven't royally ticked you off, perhaps you can
> suggest my next step? Thanks for listening whether you answer or not.
> 
> Don Henson
> 
> On Fri, 2002-07-05 at 14:43, Donald D. Henson wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Joel Hammer [mailto:Joel at HammersHome.com] 
> > Sent: Friday, July 05, 2002 14:32
> > To: Donald D. Henson; samba at lists.samba.org
> > Subject: Re: [Samba] Newbie Help
> > 
> > 
> > Have you walked throught docs/textdocs/DIAGNOSIS.txt in the source
> > directory. Is the XP the only machine that can't share documents with
> > the linux server?
> > 
> > Joel
> 