I am still trying to get my Samba to work. Strange things are happening with that thing. First, I configured my Linux box and WinXP box with static IPs, since there are only 2 boxes involved.

I was successful in configuring Samba with the IPs and workgroup through smb.conf, usernames and passwords, and configured the shares and privileges using:

smbpasswd -a {username}

then I was prompted with creating a password and it went fine.

My WinXP box was able to see the Linux box and access its shares after putting in the username and password created through smbpasswd. Everything was fine up till here.

Now, when I tried to make the Linux box access the WinXP box, things went bad. I used konqueror and tried "smb://{IP of WinXP box}" in the address bar and was immediately prompted with a username and password. I put in my WinXP username and password. No result. I was being denied access. I created a new user on the WinXP box but again, no result. I even tried logging out and tried accessing the WinXP share, no result. The Linux username/password combination but it failed. A ping to the WinXP machine was successful. So why the hell can't I access the Windows shares but WinXP can access the Linux shares?

Privileges problem I thought. I set the share privileges on WinXP to Everyone, that is, everyone is allowed to access and modify that share. I ensured that everything was well set manually, and set the group privileges. As far as I know, the privileges were ok. I retried connecting. No result. I disabled firewall and tried again. No result.

Note that smbclient from konsole was able to list the shares without password, but I wasn't able to access them. Again I was prompted with username and password, but everything I tried failed.

What the hell is that username and password prompt? What am I supposed to input? WinXP username and pass failed. Linux username and pass failed. New user on XP failed. New user on Linux failed. Linux user and WinXP pass failed. Vice versa failed! Now what do I do???

That's just as far as I have progressed. If it works, I'll post something... Till then, I'll be dancing samba trying to figure out how to get Samba to work.