It’s been a few years since I last set up a Samba system, and the process is still as painful as ever. A lot of this pain comes from multiple authentication systems, which all have to be in sync for things to work.
I started out with the link here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202605 and pretty much ignored all of it. In the end, I took the default 8.04.3 /etc/samba/smb.conf, and made the following changes:
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Set the workgroup in the global stanza
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Added stanzas like the following:
[music] path = /music browseable = yes read only = no guest ok = no create mask = 0644 directory mask = 0755 force user = andrew force group = sambashare
Note that I’m using user permissions, not share permissions. So I had to add and enable the Samba user:
sudo smbpasswd -L -a andrew
sudo smbpasswd -L -e andrew
Originally, I had force group = andrew. When I tried to mount using this option, I’d see:
$ sudo mount -a
mount error(5): Input/output error
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)
What lovely error messages. I found a semi-useful diagnostic tool, smbclient:
smbclient //server/music -U andrew
Enter andrew's password:
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.0.28a]
tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_NO_SUCH_GROUP
I did have an andrew group, but the user andrew wasn’t in that group according to /etc/group, so I switched to sambashare (which does have andrew as a member). Then it worked. Just adding andrew as a member of the group andrew in /etc/group was not sufficient. No idea why, but probably Samba has some concept of groups that needs to be set up too.
Next, I tried to connect again:
smbclient //server/music -U andrew
Enter andrew's password:
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.0.28a]
tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME
This let me search on NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME and discover that, gee, that means permissons are bad for the directory that is being shared. Nothing better than helpful error messages.
A final /etc/init.d/samba restart and I could connect.