So I've got Samba server running flawlessly on my Gentoo box, but I'm still struggling to get the server to see my Vista machine's shares. I've approached this problem from two angles, the first trying to get nautilus to recognize smb:// shares and the second using smbclient to browser shares. I ensured that cifs support was enabled in the kernel (I think I'm going to go back and modularize it...) and after a little googling, I made sure that gnome-base/gnome-vfs was emerged. Even after that, and restarting X, I could not get nautilus to browser netwrok shares. I next moved on to try smbclient (
smbclient -L ). To aid in the process, I've set up a Ubuntu VM to test smbclient between the two *nixes, to ensure that the problem does not lie within the server's configuration.
The Ubuntu VM is able to access both the shares on the Gentoo machine and the Vista machine using nautilus, although accessing the Vista share is definitely cumbersome and seems to work inconsistently and I'm not entirely sure why. When using smbclient from the console on the Ubuntu box, I am able to scan the shares on the Gentoo box, however I first had to enable lanman auth and client lanman auth in the Ubuntu VM's smb.conf to connect to the server. I'm not really sure why the server is requesting lanman authentication, although maybe some sort of authentication/encryption is required by samba to connect to shares that don't use user-level security. Theoretically, no authentication should be necessary using smbclient since guests are allowed. I'm still digging to find the answer...
In the process, I definitely had one big *duh* moment. After changing my USE flags in /etc/make.conf to add samba, I wanted to ensure all packages now would support samba (particularly gnome). I ran
emerge --update --deep --newuse world, only to get stopped immediately with a "masked package error," as well as an error stating that I needed to update portage. So I updated portage and ran
emerge --update --deep --newuse world again, only to hit a brick wall trying to update /sys-lib/timezone-data. Portage could not find timezone-data-2008c. This seemed a bit odd to me, as obviously, its now 2009, so why is portage trying to find a package marked 2008? So after a minute of twiddling my thumbs, I recalled having to always run 'apt-get update' on my Ubuntu laptop to update the repository tree... and I hadn't been doing the same on my gentoo machine with portage. AHA! Well a simple
emerge --sync should do the trick, and I should be home free!
Well about this time, Charter decided to throw the Internet switch from "working" to "broken," for my router and I couldn't pull down the new portage tree, at least not within a reasonable amount of time. After a failed rsync, I tried again (I was still getting about 40% of my packets through, and I really wasn't in the mood to call Charter), and got responses from the rsync server... all of which were 404. So instead of giving in, and just calling Charter, I tried switching my SYNC parameter within etc/make.conf to a different server, first to Georgia Tech's (biting my tongue... I'm a UGA grad) with no success. After having a near aneurysm due to frustration, I figured out that I needed to emerge mirrorselect and run
mirrorselect -r -i to find a new server. I managed to find a new rsync server, but finally gave in and decided it was about time to call Charter, as I was now experience around 80% packet loss *grrr.
So I dialed up the dreaded 1-888 number, I repeatedly hit '0' and was patched right through to a representative who was very helpful, and in fact got a technician out to me in a matter of two hours (unprecedented for Charter!), who came out and checked my levels, reran a cable, and swapped out my dying Motorola Surfboard modem, and got me back on my feet- he didn't even bitch about me using a router!
So now I was able to successfully sync portage, and again, ran
emerge --update --deep --newuse world only to get another error that I needed to add a USE flag to do that...
So I just did it the quick, temporary way
USE="###" emerge --update --deep --newuse world and it worked... until I got smacked with another error <sys-apps/man-pages-3 ("<sys-apps/man-pages-3" is blocking sys-apps/man-pages-posix-2003a).
this forum post which seemed to the trick...
So that's where I am now, running a deep update with new use flags, hopefully not fruitlessly, currently on package 49 of 391. I guess at the very least, my server will be all up to date! More to come later....
