At last! I finally got the last of Samba, finally getting it to work with itself (!) and WinXP. It was not an easy task, and after much Googling, I was able to find the solution. After all, Google is god! :D

Here's the scenario:

i had installed Feisty Fawn Kubuntu on my laptop, replacing Dapper. Samba was working well with Dapper, and I can't really say what I did to make it work... so after upgrade, Samba again refused to work like it should. Or perhaps, I didn't know what to do exactly.

Anyways, I wanted a simple way to share files, without users having to enter usernames and passwords. Everybody could access my Shares, since I had a small network and required minimal security.

After the Feisty install (or reinstall, since I managed to kill KDE pretty badly by switching on translucency and stuff, things which my antique graphics card did not support), I downloaded Samba, Samba-common, Smbfs and Smbclient from Adept. It went smoothly.

After that, I had to configure Samba. My workgroup is MSHOME. Therefore, I went to KControl (K-menu -> Run -> kdesu kcontrol) and accessed Samba under Internet and Network. I configured Share Level security since that is what I wanted (no usernames/passwords). Furthurmore, I configured the workgroup and the name of my pc. I defined which folder to share and who had access to it. I also granted Read/Write permission on that folder. Yosh! All done. Now to try.

I opened run and typed the \\ and the IP address of my Desktop PC. Konqueror opened and showed me the shares on Desktop PC after a few seconds. Yes. I could access the shares on my Desktop. R/W worked ok. All done here.

Now, I repeated the run, \\ and localhost (\\localhost). Again, Konqueror opened and showed my local shared folder under Kubuntu. However, things got weird when I accessed that Linux share.

As I told you, I could use Kubuntu to access shares on other machines with RW permission. But when I tried to access the Linux share locally via localhost, I got this error: "The file or folder smb://localhost/Shares does not exist". WTF! I saw the folder. I can open it via Konqueror. How come it doesn't exist?

After intense hours of Googling, I found this very very interesting site. It described about the problem I was having and proposed a solution.

Just go to KControl -> Internet and Network -> Samba -> Advanced Tab -> VFS and disable Host Msdfs. Also, check your smb.conf, usually in /etc/smb.conf for any lines saying "host msdfs = yes" and set those to no, or delete them. And ensure that the folders you are sharing are Public, Browsable and Writable. These are settable in KControl -> Internet and Network -> File Sharing. And check that Share Level Security is enabled in KControl - - -> Samba.

Site: http://niftiestsoftware.com/?p=24

I immediately followed its instructions and guess what? Samba worked to perfection for me! I could access the share locally, and other PCs could access my shares. Everything worked like it should! Wowwwww! That's what I'd called the Taming of Samba! :P Hope this article helps you tame your Samba.

P.s. I'm no Linux expert, but I just wanted to share my experience with you folks.