Samba
Samba is, it's a program that runs on a Unix box that allows you to mount
directories on the Unix box and have them appear as "network drives" from you
Win[95|98|NT|XP] box.
Here are some instructions on what to do if you want to mount your home
directory (or somebody elses for that matter) from your PC: I have turned on
password encryption. This means that before you can use our Samba server you
have to tell the Samba server what your encrypted password is. Unfortunately,
the hash technique that Wintel uses is not the same as Unix so Samba cannot
decrypt your Unix password and re-crypt it for Wintel (duh!). Follow these steps
to do it yourself:
- Login in to vlsi and become root
- Edit /usr/local/lib/samba/private/smbpasswd and add an entry for
yourself (If you don't already have one that is). The format of the file is as
follows:
<username>:<uid>:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX:<Real Name>:<Home Directory>:<shell>
Hopefully, you know all of these values. If not, you need to at
least know your username (if you don't know that, god help you).
ypcat passwd | grep <username>
It will print out something like this:
<username>:<encrpyted password>:<uid>:<gid>:<Real Name>:<Home Dir>:<shell>:::::
Hopefully, you can match up the fields between the two and make
the appropriate substitutions. Lastly, leave the XXX's in the file
as they are. They'll be overwritten after you execute the next
command.
- Type
/usr/local/bin/smbpasswd
<username>
type in your password twice (it would be a good idea to make it
the same as your unix pasword) .
After you initially change your Samba password, you can change it
again without becoming root, by using the 'smbpasswd' command with
no arguments. It will prompt you for your old password to
authenticate you.
- Connecting from a WinNT box
- Choose 'map a network drive'
- For the 'Path', type in '\\vlsi.stanford.edu\(login)'
(login) is any valid vlsi login. It doesn't have to be yours!
If you want to browse somebody elses vlsi directory, put their
login in there. If you get an error that it can't find the
path, it's probably your DNS setup on your box. I've seen the
following all work:
\\vlsi.stanford.edu\
\\VLSI\
\\vlsi\
\\VLSI.STANFORD.EDU\
If none of these work, your DNS needs some tweaking.
- For 'Connect As', type in your vlsi login.
- Press 'OK'. If it then says that you've entered an incorrect
password, type in your vlsi password and it should connect you.
- Done!
- You can mount multiple directories for multiple users. For
example, you could mount drive F: to your own home directory and
drive G: to somebody elses. You'll just have to enter your
password each time.
- Connecting from a Win9[58] box
The steps for this is very similar except that Win9[58] doesn't
have the same notion of a user as WinNT. Win9[58] doesn't have a
place to specify 'Connect As'. If you have 'users' turned on for
your box, then it will use the username of the person currently
logged in.
I've had this work and not work with various success. If you have
a Win9[58] box at home, try turning 'users' on and make the
username the same as your vlsi login.
- Permissions
Samba uses the underlying Unix permission as much as possible. As
long as you're connected as you, you can only write to files that
you would have write permission to write on vlsi itself.
The only gotcha that I can think of is if two people are sharing
the same PC and user A first connects and then user B comes along
and connects to user's A directory hoping to browse. I think user
certain conditions, the PC will send user A's password and user B
will be connected to user A's home directory as user A!
If anybody knows more than me or sees any behavior to
support/contradict this please let me know.
- General notes
Samba follows soft links across remote file systems happily. If I
have a link in my home directory that goes to /tinderbox/tk5,
Samba will happily follow that link and display the contents of
/tinderbox/tk5. This is different than nfs and should be
considered a feature.
The part above about setting your encrypted password is only
necessary if your Wintel box sends encrypted passwords. Any post
WinNT SP3 box will only send encrypted passwords, unless that's
been turned off in the registry. If your box doesn't send
encrypted passwords (either because it's old or you turned it
off), the Samba server will accept your cleartext password without
checking against the encrypted version. This is a bug in my
opinion. If there was a way to configure our server to reject all
cleartext passwords, even if they are correct, I would turn it on.
- If you cannot connect to the server at all it is possible that your ip
address is not in the range allowed by the samba server in the file /usr/local/lib/samba/lib/smb.conf
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