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

[Marcello Romani]

Gilles ha scritto:
> 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

Yes, it seems to care only about the process name it's been given, smbd 
in this case. I havent studied upstart so it might also be possible that 
somewhere in its configuration it's specified that smbd goes along with 
nmbd. But that's just useless speculation...

Tha strange thing is, on my Ubuntu 9.10 desktop machine I have 
/etc/init.d/samba
Go figure...

> 
>> 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.

I usually do something similar to aptitude search samba and install what 
seems to be the "main" package, which hopefully will pull all the 
required dependencies. Then I install the -doc package, which tipically 
contains the up-to-date docs.
But I'm sure you already know that :-)

> 
>> 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.

maybe add

guest ok = yes

> 
> Actually, I'm seeing something funny... but this is for another
> thread.
> 
> Thank you all for your help.
> 

Well I think I'll stop here as I don't have ubuntu server at hand. I 
hope I've been of some help. Good luck.

-- 
Marcello Romani