[SOLVED] Trouble configuring samba shares

[StephenRan]

Alright so I'll start off by saying I really have very little idea of what I'm doing here. I've read a lot of user guides on the issue and it seems to address a lot of problems that i'm not having, and all I want is very basic use information.

Here's my goal: I want to share a harddrive containing videos and music with my home network. There are a few windows machines and one mac that I want to share with (unfortunately I'm the only linux user).

I've managed to get samba and swat running, and I can access it from localhost:901.
I'm fairly certain that I've configured shares correctly. Under swat I can go to Shares>choose share(public) and it shows the location of the harddrive (run/media/myusername/Video) and it even shows the option "available: yes".

Now when I got to status here's what I have:

smbd: running
nmbd: running
winbindd: not running (and it will not turn on even if I tell it to start)

Under all categories "active connections", "active shares", and "open files" there is nothing.
I assume that If I was sharing correctly it would list my shares under active shares, correct?


Now here's a question that for some reason I could just not find an answer to anywhere: how do I access the share from windows? I saw plenty of troubleshooting pages for this, but all i want to know is: if I have everything configured correctly, should i be able to just automatically see the share in my network locations?
Do I have to point a browser to my ipaddress to view it? what port should it access?

If I have to add the share manually how do I do that? (from windows)

If there's any troubleshooting I should do from another computer, i can get a vitrual machine running linux to help test things too.

Thanks for any help, I know I'm a newb here, but I just couldn't find the basic info I need to get things running, only more advanced troubleshooting information.

---------- Post added at 10:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:05 PM ----------

Update: I was able to solve one problem at least.


I added the line

name resolve order = bcast host lmhosts wins

to the config file and when I run

net view /domain

on my windows computer I can now see the following :

BUTTERSGROUP
MYGROUP
WORKGROUP

before I changed the name resolve order I could not see buttersgroup. (which was the name of my workgroup on samba).

What bothers me is that I changed the name of the workgroup back to workgroup and restated all services, it still sees buttersgroup.

Now my question is, if I try and map a network drive it tells me to put in a folder in the format \\server\share

if my samba workgroup is named WORKGROUP and my netbios name is MYHAUS, should I be putting in
"\\WORKGROUP\MYHAUS" ?
When I click on browse I can choose "MYHAUS" (it's listed for me), but I still always get the error that the network location cannot be found, please make sure you spelled it correctly etc etc.

I am so confused here.

[Doug G]

if I have everything configured correctly, should i be able to just automatically see the share in my network locations?

Yes, as long as file & printer sharing is enabled on the windows machine.

[StephenRan]

Ended up being a few issues. I needed to rename the share to the name of my computer, change the server string to being with %h, and most importantly configure permissions for the ntfs drives I was trying to share. I guess that even though I had set permissions for everyone to access them, NTFS drives (apparently) ignore that and use their own set of permissions. When I forced user to butters (me) other users were finally able to access the drives.