[olug] Samba, Windows clients, and pulling my hair out

[Kevin]

IIRC, SMB doesn't have any mechanism for re-authenticating. So once you
connect as guest, you're connected as guest until that connection is
allowed to lapse. This means unmounting any mapped network drives, closing
anything opened via UNC, and not accessing them for a while(5 mins, I
think).
On Jan 22, 2013 10:18 PM, "Lou Duchez" <lou at paprikash.com> wrote:

> Mostly I'm posting this in case anyone else is having trouble with Samba.
>  I think I got it worked out.
>
> I set up a Samba share, I gave it a NetBIOS name, I figured out how to let
> it allow guest access (no particular authentication).  So far so good.
>  Then I tried setting up another share, but requiring authentication.  No
> matter how much I tried, I couldn't get a Windows computer to authenticate.
>  When I tried to connect from the Windows command line, after entering the
> password, I would get the super-helpful message "System error 5 has
> occurred".
>
> My first clue as to what was going on was the fact that I could
> authenticate if I used the server's IP address rather than the NetBIOS name
> I'd assigned it.
>
> Here is the long and short of it: I was trying to get to my Samba share
> via its NetBIOS name -- "\\TERWILLIKER\protectedshare" or whatever -- and
> that's not a good move.  Windows has trouble keeping track of the Samba
> share via NetBIOS, such that it may be able to find the share and try to
> authenticate, but then it gets all confused.  If you're going to rely on
> NetBIOS, you also probably have to go to the trouble of setting up a WINS
> server to support your NetBIOS name, otherwise your clients are going to
> connect inconsistently at best.  You can't even get around it by putting an
> entry in \Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\**Hosts, because that depends upon
> Windows being bright enough to consistently recognize your NetBIOS name as
> such and not just a zone to prepend to your domain name.
>
> What you CAN do is assign a FQDN to your server; that's something Windows
> and Linux see eye-to-eye on.  You can even put the FQDN in your
> \Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\**Hosts; it'd look something like this:
>
> 192.168.0.1 terwilliker.com
>
> So after that you'd access your share like:
>
> \\terwilliker.com\**protectedshare
>
> or even
>
> \\192.168.0.1\protectedshare
>
> After that, Samba seems to work per the documentation.
>
>
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