Samba setup assistance

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 20:13 -0700, Boyd Tong wrote:
> I have a wireless network with a MAC using OSX, a Windows 2000 Pro PC
> and a Ubuntu 6.06 PC. All systems can access the internet through
> Qwest DSL. I have downloaded Samba and am trying to understand the
> step-by-step proceedures to allow communication between boxes. The
> first goal is to be able to use the Ubuntu box as a print server for
> the three systems. The second goal is to allow file sharing between
> the windows PC and the Linux PC so I can weed out old files and
> transfer needed files to the Linux unit as a step toward elimination
> of Windows.  I have read parts of the Samba3-By Example but I need
> additional help understanding how to setup configurations for each
> box. I would be happy to bring the Linux system to a convienent
> location for help. 
----
The first thing to realize is that 'servers' shouldn't get their ip
addresses from DHCP because their ip addresses can change without
warning which tends to cause a lot of unnecessary frustration. While
DHCP supplied by ISC's dhcpd will generally re-issue the same ip address
to the same device each time, that is rarely the case when DHCP
addresses are issued by cable/dsl routers. So figure out the range of IP
addresses issued by your router and don't use those addresses. For
example...

Quest Actiontec router uses 192.168.1.1 for itself and issues
192.168.1.50 through 192.168.1.100 (possible 50 addresses). Choose
192.168.1.101 for your Ubuntu server. Choose 192.168.1.102 for your
Macintosh...etc.

The second thing to realize is that Windows network browsing works best
when all systems using Windows networking use the same 'Workgroup' - it
doesn't matter much what you call the workgroup...only that it is the
same - heavy recommendation to use 8 characters or less and no
spaces/punctuation.

The 3rd thing to do is to configure your Ubuntu to print to all the
printers via cups...easiest to get a web browser open on the Ubuntu
computer and navigate to http://localhost:631 to configure the printers.
Once Ubuntu can print to each printer, you only need to do a little
configuration in the smb.conf file to share the cups printers to the
Windows workgroup...if you can get that far, I can tell you what to put
into smb.conf to make that magic happen.

Craig