Newly installed Fedora FC4; Samba doesn't work. The first problem found was in samba logs; can't read secrets.tdb, and can't write machine_sid. Chmod a+x /etc and /etc/samba seemed to fix that problem. Yet smbd runs as root?? and can't read/write root owned directories/files? Still, Samba shares were not visible, nor accessible from Windows XP. Captured packets with tcpdump, and discovered a couple "clueless user", (i.e. ME) misconfigured options. Fixed those, and still Samba doesn't work. With trial and error, and observation, it appears that it is an authentication issue, yet nothing in samba logs. Samba (Fedora) is denying access. Used GUI configuration tools on Gnome desktop. Nope. Went through /etc/samba/smb.conf line by line, option by option; still nope. Use setsebool to set samba specific tokens use_samba_home_dirs and samba_enable_home_dirs. Doesn't fix it. Use GUI security tool on gnome desktop; doesn't fix it. SELinux? Ok, disable that. Still not working. Download Samba-3.0.20rc2 from samba.org; source and binary. Even the newest version doesn't fix problem; Samba share not visible/accessible from Windows. Ok, re-enable SELinux "targeted", using GUI on gnome desktop. RELABEL on boot. OK, what ever. "it will take a few minutes". Yeah, sure, whatever. Voila! Samba works! Perfectly! Whad I do? Even better, the NFS share I wanted to export from Fedora is now suddenly available when previously it was "no route to host". Don't ask me, I'm just a dumb truck driver.
