Category Archives: Samba

Learning from Broken Equipment and Minor Mistakes

A few days ago, I noticed that websites were loading very slowly, particularly in the early stages. It appeared as if there were problems with the DNS service being provided by my internal storage server. I tried to SSH into the machine to do some investigation and access the Webmin web interface; neither option worked. However, I was able to receive replys to pings sent to the server. I knew something was up, but I would have to dig in to figure out exactly what.

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A Weekend Project

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This weekend, I finished the bulk of the work of a long-standing project I had been pondering. I had all sorts of data lying around on my desktop machine that I didn’t want to lose. Photos, videos, school assignments, and the like. I wanted to be able to back up multiple machines and be able to synchronize my documents, especially while I was using my laptop. Knowing what I wanted to do, and being the IT control freak I am, I chose to build out a home storage appliance. I thought I would share my build process.

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RCHFH Network

Things got a little interesting today as I was trying to set up the network for RCHFH.

The major problem was that the two clients I was running could ping each other, but not the server. I suspected a cable or simple configuration problem, but I tried to ping from the server to the clients, and that worked. I knew it wasn’t the cable.

Next, I tried examining the IP configuration of the clients. All looked normal.

Finally, it dawned on me that I had set up a firewall at one point through the Mandrake Control Cent
er. I took down the ethernet interface and flushed the chains from iptables. That wasn’t successful, so I took eth0 down again and removed the iptables kernel modules entirely. A quick ping later, and I was in business.

Now, the connectivity is restored; Samba actually logged me onto multiple machines and allowed me to connect to the server with the shares that I had set up.

Samba/Network for RCHFH

Over the last week or so, I have been putting together a network for the Richland County Habitat for Humanity.

Today, I configured Samba to allow for storage of the critical files on their network to occur on the server instead of their Windows 9x clients. I was able to use smbclient on the server and get logged in and browsing around with that.

So far, no actual network gear has been donated or purchased, but I hope that will come soon. A few more phone calls will have to be made, and then a decision as to where to make our purchases (Staples ).