Samba
Samba - On my new little computer I have installed Red Hat 9 which is quite cool. It comes with samba as one of the packages. Samba is a bit of software which provides smb shares on a linux machine. I thought it would be useful to set it up as I mainly use a Windows machine and it would be good to use the my new 120gb mini-itx as a file server. Samba is acutally pretty straight forward to set up but as I read more about it realised I could set it up as a Primary Domain Controller on my network.
Obviously I didn’t really have any idea what this was to start off with it just sounded cool to have something for free that if was going to run it with windows software would have cost me an arm and a leg. This added a little bit of extra complication to my Samba set up. With a PDC you can have roaming profiles - which again sounded cool as I have a little laptop which I use wirelelssly in the lounge and I thought it would be good to access my work files from that just my logging on as me. The laptop is Win98 so it doesn’t really do profiles properly although I have managed to get it to work.
My main source of help to do this set up was this IBM tutorial. All you need to do is follow it and Samba will work as a PDC - its’ that simple. The only thing I changed was this line:
logon home = \\%L\%U\
logon path = \\%L\profiles\%U
to this:
logon home = \\%L\%U\
logon path = \\%L\%U\
This helps the win98 work. After that everything was hunky dory. A word of warning if you start messing with profiles on your computer back it up - I did manage to lose about 2 years of accumulated email - which I guess in some ways is a good thing!
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