a little samba help

[Karl Hegbloom]

On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 21:46 -0600, Wade Smart wrote:
> I have a cable modem. I have my desktop plugged into the ethernet
> port. I have a laptop with XP (my wifes) accessing through the
> wireless port. I really just want to allow them to share some files,
> and allow the laptop to use the printer.
> 
> I'm trying to set up samba with lots of difficulty. I'm following the
> guide but its not making a lot of sense overall. Neither computer can
> see the other. 
> 
> Is this really the only way to do this?

No, it's not. If you enable access to the printer server, the laptop can
access the printer without Samba.  See:

 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NetworkPrintingFromWinXP

I found that by searching for "print" at the Wiki.

The Ubuntu Linux machine can already access files shared from XP.  To do
so, go to Places, Network Servers, Windows Network, and find the XP
shared folders there.  If they don't show up, then you'll have to tweak
the share settings from XP, and IIRC maybe wait 5 minutes or so for the
browse protocol to do what it does.

If XP is capable of visiting an ftp:// URL, then you can avoid
installing Samba by instead installing an ftp server, such as 'vsftpd'.
I think it will work out-of-the-box, though you may want to limit access
to it to only machines inside your network.  Do this by ensuring that
the incoming FTP ports are blocked in your cable modem's network route
filtering rules.  They are probably blocked unless explicitly enabled.

>From inside your LAN, you can then access files with a URL like:

  ftp://myname@the.host.my.lan/home/myname/the/file/path.txt

Maybe Windows XP has a virtual file system layer like GnomeVFS that will
allow applications to visit that file directly, or maybe you'll have to
copy it over first, then copy it back when you are done editing.

If you decide you really do need Samba, then also install Swat, and
configure Samba using a web browser at: http://localhost:901/  Swat
makes it a lot easier to get working.

-- 
Karl Hegbloom <hegbloom at pdx.edu>