Thanks to Joachim, Chris, Tim and Claude who all answered my question, what a helpful group of people. Cheers guys.
You don't make it clear what you think the relationship is between your problems with Samba shares and not knowing your server name.
Just checking everything that my limited knowledge can throw back at me. I thought (wrongly ?) that \servername\sharename was the core of SAMBA sharing.
For some insights into various issues that come into play when trying to get Samba working see the recent thread on this list "Samba won't dance"; you can find your Samba server name in the smb.conf file, which is located in /etc/samba; there are a number of GUI's that you can use to edit that file if you'd rather; 'system-config-samba' brings up the minimalistic Redhat configuration utility; if you use the KDE desktop, there's a comprehensive Samba configuration GUI built into the KDE Control Center in the 'Internet & Network' section.
To be honest, I have no idea what GUI I'm using, I know that's sad but I'm starting from nothing with linux.
Things to keep in mind (approaches will vary depending on whether you're using KDE or Gnome):
How do I find out?
You have to not only configure your Samba shares You have to make sure that the smb and nmb services are started
Ah. I had got as far as SMB services (guessed that much) didn't know about nmb and have started that now.
- you may have a nice GUI
command called 'Services' where you can turn services on and off
Yes I have.
- look in your menus; else, 'man chkconfig' will explain to you how to
use that command to turn services on and off You have to configure your firewall to allow smb and nmb traffic, specifically on ports 137, 138, 139, and 445 - 'system-config-firewall'
Indeed it does and after reading this I have changed the settings to allow SMB NMB.
gets you into the redhat firewall configuration utility if you're not using any others such as Shorewall or Firestarter Test each machine you want to participate in your network to see if you can ping it from the others, and whether it can ping the others... There are Selinux related commands you must run depending on what you want to do - watch your Setroubleshoot warnings and messages to see if you're getting smb and nmb related denials. Finally, you may run into some rather esoteric issues if you're attempting to run the latest KDE4 with DCOP errors - check your system logs for DCOP related errors if you think you've got everything else right, and if you're running some flavor of KDE4...
Now that got complicated and I don't understand that bit. I have now moved on a little but am now getting an error....
SELinux AVC Denial - flashing banner I can't stop!!!!! SELinux is preventing the Samba daemon from reading user's home directories.
I'm stumped again!
I suppose I should do some reading to find out what on earth SELinux is and then how to switch some of it off.
Flipping complicated just to share a folder this linux stuff. <smile>
Cheers,
Bob.