Configuring SAMBA Server

First of all you have to make sure that the Samba server is running; and of course that all your network connections are active and functional, otherwise you will be wasting your time trying to figure out why something is not working; but this is basic and you should know it.

Starting, restarting and stopping the Samba server:

[root@server2 root]# service smb start
[root@server2 root]# service smb restart
[root@server2 root]# service smb stop

If the server is not running at boot time use the services control panel to set it -run at boot time.

Samba server simulates a windows domain server; however, as seen, it actually works just as a workgroup. As a matter of fact, it is defaulted to a workgroup. If you already learned how to do scripting, I am sure you can do a lot of automated tasks to configure your samba server once you've learned the essentials.

Samba can be accessed from any windows system. Depending on the version of windows, security risk is involved. My suggestion is that if you are going to set up a Samba server in your network, try to use NT, Windows 2k pro or XP pro. With these versions you can improve some securities at system level.

For windows 2000 and XP:

Disable Domain member: Digitally encrypt or sign secure channel data
Disable Domain member: Digitally sign secure channel data (when possible)

This is done through Security settings => Local Policies => Security Options.

See Microsoft knowledge base for any error you may encounter…

Samba's main configuration file resides in /etc/samba/smb.conf under Mandrake Linux. For other distributions it may be located in different place. The steps in the configuration are still the same. Let's analyze the configuration file on the next page: