'not listening for calling name' error (and RedHat stuff)

[Stephen L Arnold]

When the world was young, Paul Sherwin <psherwin at telinco.co.uk> 
carved some runes like this:  

> On Wed, Feb 10 David Taylor wrote:
> 
> > I'm new to Samba and am having problems getting Samba V1.9.18p10
> > (RedHat V5.2) to respond to a login request. It's got to be something
> > simple that I've overlooked - it should work out of the box?

The previous guy's post should fix it (the loopback address in 
hosts allow), but the RH52/samba 1.9.18p10 setup seemed to work 
pretty good for me out of the box (even changing to shadow and 
encrypted passwords worked fine with RH samba binaries).  It took 
me a while to figure out named, nsswitch.conf, resolv.conf, etc.  
Also, if it seems to hang for 30 sec or so when you telnet to the 
RH box, try changing the entry in the hosts file for the windoze 
client (ie, if client.domain.org is the first name in /etc/hosts, 
change it to just "client" and use the former as the second name).

> The bundled RedHat configurations definitely do _not_ work out of the box,
> because of RH IP configuration idiocy. My RH5.0 system set itself up to
> broadcast a request for a DNS server whenever it needed a hostname absent
> from /etc/hosts. Of course, there _isn't_ a DNS server on my network (and
> on most other SOHO nets I'd imagine) so large parts of TCP/IP broke,
> including samba.

That's because the default RedHat setup is to use named in a 
caching only configuration.

> I fixed this by removing /etc/resolv.conf.

You should probably edit nsswitch.conf instead (I have resolv.conf 
pointing to a local ISP DNS, but I hardly ever dial out from the 
linux box).  Most of the time, our LAN is isolated from the outside 
world (except when people dial out from their windoze boxes).

> The RH Samba setup doesn't seem to use keepalive packets either
> - result, if you reboot your W95 system, Samba doesn't always
> realise it and netbios name resolution screws up 
> (enabling the socket option SO_KEEPALIVE and adding
> 'keep alive = 60' in smb.conf seemed to fix things for me).

Don't know about that (I've never needed that particular setting).  
If NetBIOS name resolution is goofy, then you might want to try 
enabling WINS.  Otherwise you need the same lmhosts file on every 
machine (that's my setup, only because the LAN guy is afraid of 
relying on linux for anything).  I'd prefer to use WINS myself...

> Getting a complex Samba setup to work can be a complete pain in the bum,
> even if the basic configuration is correct. I suggest you start by trying
> to share the /tmp directory with as much security disabled as possible.
> When this works, get ready to learn about all the interesting methods of
> password encryption M$ uses.

I don't think the samba guys can be held responsible for arbitrary 
changes to M$ client behavior, broken network redirectors, etc.  To 
my mind, windoze (all versions) is a *much* bigger kluge than samba 
over unix/linux.  Your complaints seem to have more to do with a 
lack of understanding of how SMB relates to the underlying unix 
file permissions (and other windoze-unix interactions) more than 
anything else (as well as the fact that integrating a real OS 
(linux) with crap tends to expose the inherent problems existing in 
the crap side).  That wasn't meant as a dig at you personally (but 
it kinda sounded like it eh? ;-)  Getting all the linux services 
going (such as samba, named, squid, apache, networking stuff, etc) 
has been a real educational experience for me (it pretty much 
exposed my own serious ignorance too), but I've learned a *helluva* 
more useful stuff doing it than I ever did working with that other 
crap (sorry, but the word "crap" just springs to mind whenever I 
think of M$ products...).

> Anybody who buys a RH distibution expecting not to do any Unix system
> admin is in for a very nasty shock.

Seriously, how can anyone expext to buy/install/setup/run a real OS 
like linux without doing any "Unix system admin" stuff?  That's 
like expecting to buy a car and not learning how to drive.  Sure 
it's a steeper learning curve than windoze, but you can actually 
*do* some serious (and very cool) stuff, rather than pull your hair 
out and reboot constantly.  I'll admit that I feel like an idiot at 
first when I take on a new area of the system (what the hell is 
SQL?), but once I get stuff working I also feel a great sense of 
accomplishment.  And now our PC/LAN guy comes to me for technical 
help... (he still thinks I'm nuts though)

Sorry for the evangelism - would that be preaching to the choir?

But you are right (in a way) about RedHat.  They seem to want to do 
things just a little bit different than other distributions (their 
samba configuration is definitely non-stock).  Seemingly arbitrary 
RedHat changes have bitten me in the ass many times.  That said, 
I've always come back to them after trying others (eg, slackware, 
debian, etc).  I guess I'm a bit masochistic (I *did* marry a fiery 
latina after all ;-)

Steve (hey, at least I didn't post the entire digest, or a bunch of 
html crap)


************************************************************
Stephen L. Arnold                     arnold.steve at ensco.com

Linux:  It's not just for nerds anymore...