On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 11:45 -0400, Claude Jones wrote: > On Thursday April 17 2008 9:30:21 am Craig White wrote: > > I am a samba team member and I will say... > > ___________snip__________ > > > > - samba has its own mail lists, the primary users list is very > > active and it appears that people on all Linux and UNIX > > installations have various configuration issues...it's not a > > Fedora thing. > > > > Fedora adds the complexity of SELinux but I think that is not > > a major hurdle. > > > > I'm glad you solved your problem > > Unfortunately, no. Didn't know you were a samba team member, > though I'm not sure what that means exactly. I assume it does > mean that you know a lot more than I do, which was already clear > from the interventions you've made in this thread. I don't doubt > all the things you pointed out about its capabilities. I > actually did download the huge manual and print it out in a > previous attempt to fight through similar problems. > > I don't think there's a Samba problem, or a Fedora problem. I > think there's a problem with getting Fedora to work in a > reliable, simple fashion in an environment such as the one I > typically have to be in, which is what I've described - a very > basic network of mixed Windows and Linux boxes. I have tried > distro after distro where it does just work, right out of the > box. > > I just don't have the time to wade through that huge array of > documentation that you cited, though I have tried to many times. > In any case, it's almost never a purely Samba problem. There's a > whole array of things that have to be working correctly with a > Linux box on a network with Windows machines -- > > I suggest that users shouldn't have to try to parse a 1000+ page > manual to get basic networking going - it can be made to work, > simply, and out of the box. Many distros do it, and I've seen it > time and time again. Nobody has explained yet why it doesn't > with Fedora - I still consider it a weakness of the distro... I > hope that people in the development teams who might read this > don't take this as an attack - it's not, it's an observation, a > critique. I hope I'm not coming across as a hysteric, or as > angry, because I'm neither. ---- not at all...I recognize that there are a TON of configuration options with samba and many people simply don't want to wade through the documentation so I don't think your expectations are unique. I suppose that a list like this somewhat offers the option not to wade through their documentation but I hope you realize that you get what you pay for here...in other words, suggestions may or may not be useful...including suggestions from me. If distribution A seems to work out of the box but distribution B doesn't it may mean that distribution A has chosen a better set of configuration defaults or in your case, it may have been as simple as firewall settings that block specific traffic which I think means that the distribution can hardly be blamed. Also, some significant changes occurred to samba at 3.0.11 and 3.0.21 which impacted RHEL products when they finally upgraded rather than patching 3.0.9/3.0.10 on RHEL 4/5 respectively but Fedora tends to go with the latest versions of samba which can be troubling to people like you who expect their smb.conf from 3.0.4 days to continue to work without adjustment. I think if you consider how typical Windows installations work...server does not have any firewall/packet filtering turned on by default, workstations do not turn on file sharing by default but if you do turn on file sharing, you then have to adjust your firewall rules to allow 'Windows File and Print Sharing' to allow port 137/137/139/445 traffic through. Then in Win2K, WinXP Professional, the default workgroup is 'Workgroup' but in WinXP Home, it's 'MSHome' which causes all sorts of confusion. I think that in some respects, expecting sanity or default settings in samba to be universal is entirely unreasonable considering their target. Craig
