When rebooting tredenti, be sure to click "OK" on the login screen where it asks for a password. Do not click "CANCEL".
If you make this mistake then tredenti will not be able to use Microsoft networking, which means it will not be able to print. You must reboot.
MS Windows and OS/2 natively support a networking protocol for sharing files and printers called SMB. Samba is a unix program that adds full SMB capability to any unix machine.
In Barbara Di Eugenio's lab we run Samba on the monviso Solaris machine. Monviso exports two printer queues and a disk area. The tredenti PC can remotely print to monviso's print queues and access the shared disk area.
A bit of basic SMB terminology: shared disk areas are called shares .
The monviso share is available from the other Suns under the filesystem /pcshare . Thus by placing a file in /pcshare it becomes visible from both the PC and all Suns.
Be sure to read about the chaotic ownership of shared files.
There is a lovely web-based interface to Samba at:
This facility is called SWAT, the Samba Web Administration Tool. It enables you to perform the following from a web browser:
When you call up the SWAT page it will ask you for the root password.
Access to the Samba configuration page is restricted to our lab computers.
It possible to edit the Samba configuration file manually. It is located in /usr/local/samba/lib/. I greatly encourage you to use the web page instead . There are quite a few parameters, most of which are obscure. It is hard to know which ones to tinker with. The web page does you a favor by presenting both simplified and advanced views, and by providing help on all parameters.
Monviso appears on the network in the following way. All this information appears on the SWAT globals page, but you should not need to change it.
| Work Group: | BD |
| Netbios Name: | MONVISO |
| Security: | SHARE |
This means that from the PC you can access monviso by looking for machine MONVISO in workgroup BD .
Security = SHARE means that there is no expectation of user accounts on the PC. There is a user account tredenti on monviso that somehow handles the accesses from the tredenti PC.
(The alternative security model--which we are not supporting--requires having users log in to the PC with their own account names. These accounts would then be mirrored by corresponding monviso accounts.)
The Samba configuration program allows you to edit the configuration of the printers and the shares. Note that each configuration parameter has a "help" button. These configurations are not described further here.
You can find the tredenti configuration in the network control panel, under the component:
Client for Microsoft Networks .
Tredenti is configured as belonging to the same workgroup BD, with name TREDENTI. Workgroup BD has only these two machines.
Warning: The networking control panel also has an option to export its own files and printers to the network. When enabled, a component called Server for Microsoft Networks appears. There is no need to enable this, and we are better off leaving it disabled. Notice that there is nothing stopping other machines in SEO can browse workgroup BD .
Tredenti users have unrestricted printing and file sharing privileges within the file shares and printer queues exported by monviso. Samba is configured so that only tredenti (and our other Suns) can access these shared resources, other machines on the network are excluded from using them.
The monviso shared disk area can be found on tredenti by exploring the "network neighborhood" for a share named "monvisoshare."
The monviso shared print queues are set up as "printer ports", using addresses:
| \\MONVISO\bdps | (Postscript) |
| \\MONVISO\bdpcl | (PCL) |
Any PC printer queue can be attached to any port.
Samba has two demons, each listening on different IP ports:
| nmbd | Network administration (name service, browsing, etc.) | |
| smbd | Handling shared services |
The log files for these demons are in /usr/local/samba/var/ .
These two demons are placed in /etc/inetd.conf , so they are run when requested. After servicing requests they linger for a while in case there are more requests. Then they die until they are next needed.
The method of running smbd and nmbd on-demand out of inetd
is not the installation default.
Originally they were started from bootup from /etc/init.d so they
would run "forever." However we were having a problem with these demons dying
during episodes of network instability, meaning that printing and filesharing
would mysteriously stop working until the next reboot of monviso. (You can also
manually restart the demons from the SWAT web page.) The on-demand inetd
method, described in the documentation, avoids this problem.
There is a web page at www.samba.org .
The SWAT Samba Configuration Page on monviso also has extensive documentation.
I have found no big need for the O'Reilly book.
Last Revised: 11 June 2002
Michael Glass