It took a long freaking time, but I finally have samba working. Cross your fingers that it will still be working tomorrow... I had a hard time with it, but I think that when I figured out that there was a firewall blocking my packets was the breaking turning point. I'm not sure that was the only fix, but it sure helped a lot. Other things like the work group name is case sensitive.
I'm using XP Home and there are tons of sites that say that you can't use Win XP Home, you must use Pro. That's only for if you are trying to use "domains" and have the samba box in another domain.
Another point of note, if you want to change the firewall settings in RH, use /sbin/iptables and the other associated commands. Don't try and modify the file by hand as some examples show you.
I feel very productive since I got home tonight. I'm not feeling too great but I got vnc and samba working. Next I'm going to move stuff over to the linux more and play with it as a file server. I may also make it a dev box and load it up with some RAM and just use my laptop as a terminal. We'll see. I wonder how well my laptop would run if I put RH on it...
Is this Fedora box behind your connection-sharing router? If so it doesn't really need a firewall, even if there some basic port-forwarding set up.
ReplyDeleteThe router is a port blacklist for incoming connections, unless you specifically port-forward. So it seems as though nothing would get through the router but blocked by the firewall.
If you are really concerned about security on this box and you have ports forwarded (ie. ssh) you're much better off being diligent with updates than worrying about a firewall.
ReplyDeleteA firewall blocking all of the other ports won't help you if you have ssh port forwarded to the Fedora box and there's a well-known sshd exploit in the wild. You can still be attacked from the Internet.
To prevent against that you might want to keep the machine up-to-date with yum, it's a great tool. You can even run it nightly as a cron job to check for and install updates to your FC software every day.
Samba is probably the hardest thing to get working. It should be one of the easiest though. File sharing is something that people want to work easily. You can get away with making a web server hard to install, because not everybody will want to use it. However, most people at home with a network will want filesharing to work. I can't believe that they can't configure by default to not block Samba if you choose to install samba.
ReplyDeleteI think that I will still keep the firewall on. I do want to play around with a web server so I'll probably use the router to forward to that box. It's on my wireless router subnet so if it doesn't hurt (now I know what to look for), I'll keep it on if only to play with it and become familiar with it.
ReplyDeleteAfter I get FC3 up I think that I'll have yum in a cron job like you said... thanks. ;-)
It tooks me 10 minutes to set up samba on a Fedora Core 3 box with no firewall and a network of Windows XP machines. Piece of cake.
ReplyDelete