Samba and VL Light problems

[dln9]

I ran /sbin/vlsmbmnt as a regular user in a terminal.  It worked fine.  Then, I thought, now I'll try running it from the menu.  And it worked just fine.  I don't know why it started working, but now it does work from the menu. 

Just to clarify - vlsmbmnt won't work if the name of the directory on the foreign machine has a space in it - Is that correct? 

Then, I made all the changes you advised in the smb.conf file.  At the end of it all, everything worked great. 

Thank you very much for all the help, you deserve a day off.  Actually walking through this has helped me understand it better.  (And I now understand that smbpasswd must mean the user name and password needed to access the host machine.) 

One more question - Why the wait of seven minutes?  What is taking place, and why does it take so long? 

Thanks very much again. 

(bigpaw - I actually did read through that document, I just didn't mentally connect it with that name when you first mentioned it.) 

[nightflier]

Glad you made it work. 

Yes, looks like vlsmbmnt can not handle spaces in share names. I will try to fix that.

Samba does a lot of talking behind the scenes. When there are several samba servers on the network, they have to agree on who is the master and what shares are available. This can take several minutes.

Have a great weekend!

[dln9]

You are going to try to fix the issue with spaces in the names? 

Whoa! I didn't know I was working with the VL designer/programmer.  Now I'm really honored you took time to help me. 

Thanks again. 

[GrannyGeek]

Besides, even if I were to go with sshfs - whatever the heck that is - I'd still want to figure this out. 

The following is no solution to your problem and I'm putting it here just because it adds something important for people who want to network their Linux computers and not go through the issues that often pop up with Samba. I think the easiest way to network Linux computers is through nfs. I don't know what sshfs is, don't want to know, in principle avoid anything with "ssh" in the name. ;-)  That's also how I feel about emacs and any incarnation of  TeX.

I have a HowTo here:
 http://forum.vectorlinux.com/index.php?topic=669.msg3845#msg3845

It's easier to do than to describe and once you have the nfs network set up, you can simply copy the related files in /etc that I mention to another VL installation with a few minor and obvious modifications. It takes me about two minutes to get the network going when I'm setting it up in a new partition. I don't automount the networked partitions (though it can be done) but a simple mount command works instantly when you want access to another computer on your nfs network.

For networking with Windows, Samba is by far the best choice. It is possible to share a printer connected to a Windows machine without using Samba. KDE's Konqueror can work quite well for some file sharing without Samba. I think it depends on how much and how often you need access to a Windows partition.
--GrannyGeek

[nightflier]

Whoa! I didn't know I was working with the VL designer/programmer.

I'm just one of many volunteers. 

Here is a new package which I would like for you to test. If you feel up to it, run these commands in a terminal:

Code:

su
(enter your root password)
cd
wget http://cincinnatix.com/vectorlinux/nightflier/vlsmbmnt-1-noarch-3vl60.tlz
upgradepkg vlsmbmnt-1-noarch-3vl60.tlz

Now try "Windows Networking" and see if it will handle shares with spaces in their names.

[PerunMan]