Samba and FreeBSD

I've been screwing around for a week now trying to get my newly installed FreeBSD on my LAN with other XP computers. On the FreeBSD side everything seems to check out ok -- I can ping all the other computers and other troubleshooting suggestions from here are ok too.

But on the XP side, I can ping the FreeBSD computer ok and the FreeBSD computer is visible in Network Neighborhood, but when I click on it I get an error message "Access Denied". I've checked the hosts file on the XP computer and it contains the right IP for the FreeBSD computer, and the smd.conf file on the FreeBSD computer contains a line that grants access to all hosts on the network. I've also made sure that accounts have been set up on the FreeBSD computer with the same username and password that I'm logged in as on the XP computer.

What is the most probable cause for this problem????

Maybe I'm asking a dumb question here, but you did set up the accounts using smbpasswd -a, right? There's a difference between the *nix user accounts and the samba user accounts.

not a dumb question -- I didn't know I had to do that. But it didn't help. Now I got on XP error message "\\Marauder is not accessible. You might not have permission on the network resource. The account is not authorized to log in from this station"

One more thing -- Microsoft changed the SMB client protocol a bit on Windows XP and you may need to tweak the Windows end of things to work correctly.

1. Go to: Start --> Run --> gpedit.msc
2. Go to Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options
3. Disable the following entries (they should be enabled normally):
Domain member: Digitally encrypt or sign secure channel data (Always)
Domain member: Digitally encrypt secure channel data (when possible)
Domain member: Digitally sign secure channel data (when possible)
4. Reboot your Windoze box and try again.

If this doesn't work, please post your smb.conf file here and also how you added the specific username (i.e.) your exact adduser and smbpasswd -a commands.

disabling those features did not help either -- but they probably didn't hurt. my smb.conf is attached.

I created the smbpassword like this (not my real password):


Thanks for your help

Your file looks very similar to my file. About the only thing that looks different is the hosts allow string. Is your windows network on 192.168.2.xx?

Another thing that is different between my file and yours is that I have the [netlogon] section commented out.

Here's another one of my dumb questions for you -- are you running both smbd and nmbd?
/usr/local/sbin/smbd -D
/usr/local/sbin/nmbd -D

Also, you're accessing it like this right? \\Spiders-den\melsdir

thanks for trying to help -- it still doesn't work so I guess I'll give up on it. I don't really like *nix os anyway.

well then run away, like your little dragon, and you can hang out with SpongeBob at the "Super-Weenie-Shack". Unix is not something for weenies.

I love you too!

[edit]As it turned out, it was a hardware problem. FreeBSD doesn't have the right device driver for the network card I have installed. I downloaded a new driver from the manufacturer, and it has a readme file that says for FreeBSD I have to recompile the driver. But it works only with FreeBSD version 3.X. So when freebsd.org comes back online I'll have to upgrade to the newest version from here [/edit]