[Samba] new user introduction, and a few questions

[Xen]

kendell clark schreef op 17-07-2016 8:00:
> hi
> Ok, I've now got more info. Doing smbclient -L blackfang returns the
> following error. unknown name switch type dns. session setup failed.
> NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE.

I don't know why it fails there or did fail there. But typically you can 
use the -N option to specify the Guest account.

Your call must be:

smbclient -NL blackfang

(N becomes before the L here).

I understand your error and your frustration, it is not your fault.

When developers in general are content with a solution that works for 
experts, that means that in general you need to become an expert before 
you can use it. In general developers are experts and when experts are 
their target audience....

Or you could also put it this way: if the target audience is an audience 
that has already, in general, on average, spent at least 20.000 hours 
learning Linux, then that shifts the idea of how user friendly your 
solution should be.

Further many Linux people (not saying developers, but the people around 
them as well) do not like to hear much that something doesn't work.

The attitudes on this list are much more user friendly than what you 
will see around, from my perspective and opinion.

So there is nothing to blame but, well, culture.

In any case, I can try to help as much as I can, but I do not have a 
solution myself, as this really requires GUI development, and the best I 
can do myself is shell scripting, or at best hacking C source code to 
make something work that currently doesn't. I find that "server" coding 
is easier to get started with than "GUI coding".




> This is frustrating. Isn't this supposed to
> work regardless of whether I have an account on the machine I'm trying
> to connect to?

Guest user.

>  Hear's what I'm trying to do. I'm basically trying to
> configure samba, however I need to so that when I try to connect to a
> windows computer or a linux computer running samba, it asks me for a
> user account and password if needed, otherwise it connects without
> error.

It is using guest user by default.


> Why is this proving so difficult? I'm really sorry if I sound
> frustrated, it's not you guys at all.

I do not know if you are visually impaired yourself. I had a friend who 
was a great programmer but his eyesight was so bad that his computer 
operation was so severely limited that the simplest of things (for me) 
were very hard for him because his reading speed was just way below 
mine.

Not saying that to be negative. Just saying that I could understand if 
using Linux would be harder for someone with bad eyesight. The amount of 
reading you have to do sometimes to get the simplest things working is 
abysmal.

This friend wanted to use some C library or C++ library on his Windows 
computer and he did not understand how to use it. This boggled my mind a 
bit because such things are generally rather easy. He didn't know how to 
install it. It appears he had been programming for quite a number of 
years. But he required on-screen magnification, a huge screen, and 
mostly also, a huge keyboard ;-).

I understand running up against walls, I do so myself all the time. 
Recently I ran up to the "autofs" wall being scarcely documented. The 
developer promised he would add the missing bits to the documentation. 
It is like the key to the secret of how it worked, was missing.

People who have learned these things in the past "the hard way" now 
often forget how it was for them to learn it. Then, they consider such 
knowledge "obvious" but it was never for them. When they learned it.

What they already know, they think a new person should easily be able to 
learn, but they forget that they already know all the pathways. They do 
not have to look for the pathways. And they don't realize this.

They don't comprehend a person that doesn't already know where to find 
what they think that new person should be looking for. Ie. sure it is in 
the manual, but you know where to find it, but the other person doesn't.

Everything becomes rather easy if you've already scaled the walls and 
know all the crevices.

Finding your way blindly proves to be a little harder than what people 
expect, no pun intended ;-).



>  I've been banging my head against
> the wall with this for about a week, trying to configure samba before
> releasing  the new stable image of sonar to the public. It also doesn't
> help that most of my users are not at all understanding when something
> they expect to work doesn't. Windows just works, why can't linux work
> like windows, so on and so forth. That's what I have to look forward to
> if I get this wrong.

Can't blame them. A small team of 5 people working at this for 3 months 
would have the most perfect solution available for everyone (from a GUI 
perspective). We also have small teams (so to speak) of 5 people working 
at it for 3 months, but they perform so poorly on a whole that they 
produce maybe 1% of the advances that the other team could achieve.

In Linux, I believe, without hoping to offend anyone here, and 
particularly in the arena of graphical user interfaces where everyone 
has a different idea of what needs to happen, cooperation between 
developers and other creatives seems to be so difficult that progress is 
kept back merely by way of disagreement.

Also a lot of people want (their) users to like something, instead of 
making what people like. So first I make something and then I get you to 
like it, instead of the other way around. User opinion is often 
disregarded and frustrated.

Take KDE. You can choose from about 10 Window Switchers (Window List 
switchers when you press alt-tab) but all of them are bad.

Cinnamon (Mint) has one that is almost perfect and convenient to use. 
Why the difference?

Apparently the KDE people are not content with using the obvious. So 
either the thumbnails are too big, or they are too small. But the middle 
ground is not ventured.

You can't actually have normal-sized icons. You can only have those that 
are too small, or too big.

So you have 10 alternative ways of doing things, and none of them are 
right. And then someone else makes only a single alternative, and it is 
perfect.

:-/.

Meaning. You can have a million developers doing the bad thing, and 
after you set those million developers to work for a million hours each, 
you will still not have anything worth of mention.

But if you merely take one person doing the right thing, within 5000 
hours you will have something outstanding.


...on the Kate/Kwrite developer list there is now mention of a bug that 
was fixed before. But after a revamp the code was thrown out, and the 
bug returned. Now the developer that fixed the bug is asking for 
volunteers to tackle the issue because apparently he doesn't know how to 
do it anymore?

It's a very simple problem. And see how they go about it. See how it is 
getting tackled.

It is frustratingly inefficient this way of working, without hoping to 
put anyone in a bad light personally here.

So my general appraisal of the Linux situation in terms of user 
interfaces is that people get mired in work that does't get them 
anywhere, and inefficiently get stuck while not advancing, while someone 
else using a different way of working, or a different way of 
cooperating, would have been miles ahead by now.

Everyone seems to be stuck in the mud. Well, anyway. The Cinnamon and 
Mint people (Mate also) seem to be doing much better and appear to be 
advancing much faster.

So I think some of them are not unkind to hearing actual use cases that 
you might have and what you run into. I am not familiar with their 
developer channels just yet.

My apologies if this is too much text.

The I Ching mentions:

"No game in the field". It is not enough to be persistent in searching. 
You also have to look in the right place.

Well, whatever ;-). Regards.