[Samba] [Ubuntu 10.04] Share not visible from XP?

[Gilles]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:55:16 +0200, Marcello Romani
<mromani at ottotecnica.com> wrote:
>A samba init script should take care of restarting both services IMHO, 
>because they're really supposed to go together. Therefore it's not 
>strange that they ported to upstart only the "main" init.d script (the 
>one referring to smbd). That's all IMHO, of course.

That's also what I thought, but /etc/init.d/ contains two separate
scripts (smbd and nmbd; no trace of "samba", as specified in the
Ubuntu documentation www.tinyurl.com/ubuntu-samba-doc), and since
since I couldn't see the shares from Windows, I figured I might have
to launch both separately.

/etc/init.d/smbd doesn't seem to launch nmbd, but I'm no shell expert:

http://pastebin.com/fJB89Uc8

>AFAIKT, smbfs is needed only if you want to mount samba shares, i.e. for 
>using the linux system as a samba *client*, not server. I'm not 100% 
>sure, though.
>Regarding winbind, I find it strange that it didn't get installed along 
>with the rest of samba...

The problem is that I couldn't find an up-to-date documentation that
would say precisely what needs to be installed in Ubuntu and show a
very basic smb.conf that would work. Docs either assume people will
just append their stuff to the big default smb.conf... and somehow
figure out what packages need to be installed.

>Don't know about "available" param, but public and writable shouldn't 
>affect visibility of the server in windows neighborhood.

I added those because I saw them in some documentation... but at this
point, I'm clueless at what packages are really needed, and what needs
to be done in smb.conf to share a writable folder.

Actually, I'm seeing something funny... but this is for another
thread.

Thank you all for your help.