On Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 03:56:32PM +0000, caroline.blaker wrote:
> Hello group-
>
> I am a day old in the world of linux.
Welcome.
Yesterday, we converted our
> win2003 server to Red Hat. It appears to be connecting to the web, but
> no other computers, mac or windows, can see it on the network. What
> settings to I have to change to make it available on the local network
> and how do I change them?
Lots of possibilities. Are you using Active Directory? (Probably not if
you got rid of the 2003 server.) Assuming it's more of a workgroup type
thing, the first thing you need is samba. Now, you've said you're only
a day old, and I tend to use mental shorthand, so feel free to ask for
clarification.
I'm going to make a few assumptions, that you don't have a very
structured domain, and that this machine is primarily a file server.
Did you enable samba during installation, and allow it in the firewall?
Samba is what enables Unix and Unix like systems to shae with Windows
systems. Make sure you have nmbd running.
pgrep nmbd
You should get a number, what's known as the PID, the process ID, in
response. If you get nothing, there's a good chance that it's not
running the program you need.
Samba consists of, at a minimum for a server, 2 programs, smbd and nmbd.
You will need both going if you're using this server as a file server.
See if it's supposed to be starting.
/sbin/chkconfig --list samba
Let's assume that it's there, and hopefully, running. (You want to see
that it's on at levels 3 and 5.) If you get no such service or
something similar, then say, Oh darn, and see if you can install it. We
can cross that bridge if we have to do so.
The next issue could either be selinux or a firewall. The selinux stuff
is good, but can cause problems. Depending upon how worried you are
about outside attackers, you can turn it off for now. Unfortunately,
the canonical way never works for me--I can't even think of the command,
I haven't used it for awhile as it never seemed to fix the issues.
(However, keep in mind that at our place, we use Fedora and CentOS--both
based on RH, but they have their own differences.) You can look at the
file /etc/sysconfig/selinux and and see if it's enabled, disabled or
whatever.
Lastly the firewall. During installation, the default is to only allow
ssh through. You have to specifically allow samba. Again, if security
isn't that big a worry at this point, (and it should still be somewhat
more secure than Win2003 server, though that's a guess--I'm not
experienced with 2003) you could temporarily disable the firewall and
see if that fixes the issue.
iptables -F (I think--it might be -f). Then,
iptables -L
and see if everything is ACCEPT.
Now, keep in mind, we've now made the machine much less secure, but
right now, we're trying to troubleshoot.
Can the windows machines ping the Linux server by IP address? At any
rate, assuming samba is running and the firewall is down, they should be
able to reach fileshares on it. Of course, to reach it by name, you
have to have some sort of WINS server.
As for macs, they would mount it the same way they'd mount a Windows
share, Go=>Connect to server (command K should open that) and use
smb://servername/share
One thing which occasionally happens with Macs and samba servers (though
not always). Mac, as you probably know, will put the user name in upper
case. If the user name on the workgroup or domain is in lower case, the
user should backspace over the uppercase name and put in the lowercase
one. Otherwise, on occasion, they might have trouble connecting to
multiple shares on a server. (Don't ask me for details, I simply ran
into this a long time ago.)
>
> Additionally, i would like to "proxy in" to the server from my mac to
> continue to explore its settings from my office. Is there a "remote
> desktop"- type application I can use or do I need to use the command
> line? Are there any decent tutorials on the matter? Any help very
> appreciated. Thanks!
Yup. Actually, assuming you're looking at some book or another, they're
probably telling you to look at a lot of textfiles. In that case, you
can use the Mac's terminal (I'm assuming it's OS X). Go, Utilities,
Terminal. Then, ssh to to the server. Note that just gives you a text
based thing. The other option might be to run vncserver on the Linux
machine and some vnc client for the Mac. Sigh, I've forgotten which one
was better, I know one was bad and another was good. VNC will be better
if you need to see the GUI interface of the server.
(From an MS workstation you can use putty--just google for putty
download and the first hit will take you to it. It's an ssh client for
Windows. To use the GUI, then there are various versions of VNC--at
work, we use ultravnc, at my old place, we used tightvnc. For tightvnc,
there's a binary that just sits on your desktop, you don't have to
install anything, just click the executable.)
So, I've given you a lot of info here. Step one, see if samba is
running.
/sbin/chkconfig --list samba
(You can take a look at the chkconfig man page--as it's from
RedHat--chkconfig is a RedHat based program--it's better than most of
the Linux man pages.)
Also, keep in mind, there is probably a deployment guide, or a link to
it, included with the installation. The RedHat deployment guides are
often quite helpful.
One last comment about Linux netiquette. As you come from a Windows
background, if you respond to this post, please trim unnecessary things.
Also, please don't top post the answer. Top posting is when you put
your entire answer above my email. On most Unix or Unix-like tech
lists, inline posting is preferred--that is, answer point A after point
A, point B, after point B.
I mention this in advance because I'm extremely busy these days, and
tend to just ignore top posted things.
--
Scott Robbins
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Willow: Wow, harsh.
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