[CentOS] Easiest way to get samba up and working for Windows users?

[Les Mikesell]

Noob Centos Admin wrote:
> 
>> But, if you want to do it the hard way, you probably have an
> 
> Unfortunately I do want to do it the hard way. While the SME server
> would make things really easy, the lesson I learnt in the past with
> easy thing is that, once something break, I will really have no idea
> what is going on.

There's a tradeoff here.  When you cobble up a one-of-a-kind system 
yourself, not only is it much more likely to break than one set up by an 
expert, but no one else is going to be having the same problem so you 
won't be able to easily get help from a mail list or forum.  If SME 
server breaks, other people will likely have already posted the 
workaround or update to fix it.

> It's kind of like folks who grew up knowing only GUI, they usually are
> helpless if the mouse doesn't work.

Not exactly.  SME server mostly runs the same programs with the same 
config files as Centos, so you can look at the configs and understand 
them if you want.  The configs are actually created by perl scripts that 
merge canned snippets with your web form entries, so it is somewhat more 
difficult to modify them in ways that weren't planned but that's not 
really out of the question either.

>> authentication issue.  With the default security setting of 'user', the
>> windows users must authenticate before they can even see a share - and
>> things get weird if the name they used to log into windows is not the
>> same as the linux/samba login name.   You can still map drives if you
>> explicitly specify \\server\share, 'connect as other user' and fill in
>> the name and password, but browsing for shares often doesn't work.
> 
> I think we have a winner! This could be it as the names they use to
> log into their Windows machine are not their own. Most of them are
> inherited PC, they simply continued using the previous login since no
> password were set, usually.
> 
> Where as the other location was a new setup with new PC setup.

You can test this with the explicit mapping commands.

>> you aren't too concerned about security, you can change this to
>> 'security = share' and then you can browse before authenticating, and
>> also have the option to authenticate as different users when connecting
>> to different shares on the same machine which you can't do in user or
>> server modes.
> 
> I'll probably do this since this is what they are used to, and expect.

I see someone mentioned that this may not work anymore.  Making the 
windows and Linux logins match may be a better approach.  You can test 
that on one one box to see if it works.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com