Samba and NT file issues

David Rankin drankin at cox-internet.com
Thu Mar 15 06:03:17 GMT 2001


"Ricker, Tony" wrote:

> Sorry for being repetitive, but I have a question. Can Samba be used for 9x
> widowze machines accessing files, (access 2000, excel, word...) and have
> them open, add/modify, save files? The files would reside on Samba box and
> the user map their way to the files. Any thoughts? I appreciate all of you
> for sharing you knowledge.
>

Short answer -- Yes, Yes, and Yes again

I have recently set up my Linux/Samba box. I have a small office with 4 client
PC running Win95, Win98 and WinME. It's a law office and all our files are
stored on the Linux Box. Word, Excel, Access and various other -- All work
fine. We have Office 97 and Office 2K all accessing the shared files, the
server provides access for all machines to the internet and serves as a VPN
server so everyone can get to their files from home as well as providing ssh,
sftp, mail, etc.

The whole key to your question is file permissions, read/write access, owners
and groups. The O'Riley Using Samba html manual that is part of the Samba 2.07
distro does a good job at explaining all of this. The bottom line is that your
Win9X users all have to have accounts on your Linux box, if you have Win95
machines - patch them to send encrypted passwords, all of your users must have
encrypted password entries in the smbpasswd file, you should at a minumum have
owner and group read/write access to the files you want to share (chmod 660,
664 prefered if you want world read), and the users should be members of a
group that has group ownership of the files that the users need to access. Thus
see the smb.conf options of force user and force group for the share your users
need to access.

Once you get over this hurdle, you will find that Win9x clients accessing a
samba server is a secure and bulletproof way to handle you client/server needs.

David Rankin
Nacogdoches, Texas





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