Samba Server help

[Floppyman]

Hi all,

I set my Mandrake 9.1 system up as a Samba server today, but I have some problems. For one, I cannot use the smbpasswd command. I get an error "command not found". I downloaded the Samba files from www.samba.org, I did not install them off the Mandrake 9.1 cd. I also have no /etc/samba directory. Everything related to Samba appears to be in /usr/local/samba. In /usr/local/samba/bin I have the smbpasswd executable, but that's it. Using the command does not work, whether as user or as root. Any ideas? I would like to you it to control the access to my shares, since at the moment (in order to use them) I have them all set as public on my LAN. I'm really kind of clueless as to why this is not working since everything else appears to work fine. Did I forget to install or configure something maybe and that's why it does not work? Thanks for any help you can give me.

[mairving]

Command not found just means that it is not in your path. Copy it over to /usr/bin . I never install samba when I install the OS. The reason is that it is never compiled with the options that I want. /usr/local/samba is the default location for samba. If you want you can change where it puts binaries, library files and smb.conf when you compile it.

[Floppyman]

Hi mairving,

Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, just got around to playing with this now. I copied the smbpasswd executable to /usr/bin and ran it. I got this though:

getsmbfilepwent : malformed password entry (no : )

I get this entry multiple times after adding a user and password. At the way end I get this though:

Added user myuser

Any ideas? Thanks again for your help.

[Floppyman]

Ok, everything is working fine now. I just have one more question regarding users.

I created two usernames and two different passwords on the linux box, one for each share that I'm mapping on my win2k box. Now, when I go map the first share it asks me for a username and password. I enter those and the drive gets mapped on my win2k box from the linux box. However, when I go to map the second share I don't get prompted for a username and password, it just gets mapped, even though there are two users and two different passwords. I doesn't matter which share I map first (i.e. which username and password I enter first) the second share (whatever it ends up being) gets mapped automatically). I checked and public is set to "no" on each share. Could this be because I'm trying to map both drives from the same machine? Could it be because my username and name are similar on the win2k and linux box? Thanks again for the help.

[mairving]

The username and password only allows you to connect to the Samba Server. It just says, who are you and when you tell it by username and password, it says okay you are a valid user, come on in. Once you are connected permissions take over. So if you had 2 user shares in your home directory like /home/user1 and /home/user2 and your connected to the /home directory, then you would be able to see both shares but access them only via user/group/world permissions.

Samba can be extremely tricky sometimes with permissions particularly. The biggest thing to understand is that samba permissions can override unix permissions to a point. You can define an admin user and they will have root priviledges regardless of the unix permissions but only if you have the share as writeable = yes. You can also force users and groups on shares.