Beyond the Sky

If you wanna connect to Windows box or Linux box or allow Windows box to connect to you, you would like to enable samba.

What is samba ?
When you type whatis samba, it returns "A Windows SMB/CIFS fileserver for UNIX.". My interpretation is samba is a "protocol" that allows file sharing within Unix, Mac and windows system.

How to do it ?
Different distro have a slide different to configure it. I am using ubuntu, so bellow is how i do it to my ubuntu box. It is similar and it is not difficult to set up.

Check whether is it samba daemon is loaded.

ps aux | grep samba

As long as you get result return that means your samba daemon is running.(not included process of "grep smbd") Else, start you samba with :

sudo /etc/init.d/samba start

This will start you samba daemon, but it will not start automatically after your machine reboot. What you have to do is goto /etc/rc2.d ( for ubuntu, default run level is 2 )

cd /etc/rc2.d
sudo mv K20samba S20samba

p/s: To ensure the symlink for samba, "ls | grep samba", default should be K20samba

Okay now you can start configure your samba configuration file.

sudo vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

p/s: In case you don't use vi, then do this

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

Search for the keywords "[homes]"
You will get something like this:

wins support = no
[homes]
   comment = Home Directories
   browseable = no

# By default, the home directories are exported read-only. Change next
# parameter to 'yes' if you want to be able to write to them.
   writable = no

Change to writable = yes and save and close the file.
Now you need to restart the samba daemon:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

Okay now, the last steps, add/change samba user password.

sudo smbpasswd -U username

username is your username and if it doesn't work, that means this user doesn't have samba password set, you may try this:

sudo smbpasswd -a username

You are done! Now you may try to access windows box, what you need is your windows box ip

Open a file browser or nautilus to be specific, and put in this:

smb://your-ip

p/s: ctrl+L if you can't find a place to key in your location.
You may type command like bellow or make a launcher to your desktop:

nautilus --browser smb://your-ip

How about my windows user wanna access my linux box?
Easy, go explorer browser put :

\\your-ip

Type in correct username and password, you are done.

If it doesn't work, this might be your firewall blocked the port needed. Allow these port :

445:tcp 
139:tcp 
138:udp 
137:udp

For more information, google it lah!
An interesting wiki about samba can get it here