Just a follow up from my previous samba article... have uncovered some interesting / weird errors.

I could get my samba shares to display just fine, but they would not open under windows xp (continually showed me a login box, or told me they were not available). Turns out SElinux was causing this to happen. I monitored the samba error log (tail -f /var/logs/samba/smbd.log) and was getting "/mnt/webdev does not exist or permission denied when connecting to [webdev] error was permission denied". To fix, simply type setenforce 0 and with any luck things will start working!

Another few things to look out for... make sure ports 137, 138, 139 and 445 are open, if not...

# nano /etc/sysconfig/iptables

Add these lines...

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m udp -p udp --dport 137 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m udp -p udp --dport 138 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 139 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 445 -j ACCEPT

and restart iptables

# /etc/init.d/iptables restart

Another thing you can try is adding this line to your smb.conf file (under the global heading):

smb ports = 139

I was finding that I was getting a million error messages in the samba error log before I added that.

Ensure that you can ping your windows box from your linux machine my hostname, ie:

# ping desktop2 -c 3

Should be successful, if not there is a name resolution issue - you can try manually adding your machine to the hosts file...

# nano /etc/hosts

add (where xxx.... is your desktop machines ip address):

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx    desktop2