Ubuntu
samba package

samba 2:3.4.0-3ubuntu5.5: Cannot get samba to work after upgrade: authentication problem?

Asked by andimeier

I am running Karmic and it worked fine (including Samba which I used to share linux directories for being accessed from my Windows XP workstation) - until today.

Today I ran apt-get upgrade and since then something with Samba is broken: when I try to open a Samba share on my Windows workstation, I get the following error message (this is an ad-hoc translation because the error message was german):

  "It is not possible to access \\linux_host\share. Maybe you don't have any permissions to use this network resource. [...]"

I tried a few things, then (as I thought would be the last resort) reinstalled samba by:
  apt-get purge samba
  apt-get install samba
  pdbedit -a andi

(The first thing which surprised me that the samba daemon failed to start because neither the log files directory /var/log/samba nor the config dir /etc/samba had been created. Never mind, I mkdir'ed them. Maybe this is another issue?)

Now, it still does not work: when I try to access the Samba share by typing "\\linux_host\share" in the Windows explorer address bar, I get the above error.

What also strikes me, is that there is no entry in any samba log file which could give me any hint what is going wrong. When I try to access an not-existent share (e.g. \\linux_host\asdfasfdsa), the log file eeks and tells me so. But any attempt to access an existing share leaves no trace of it in the log files and lets this annoying error message pop up again.

I have no clue what to do, could please anybody give me a hint?

Thank you very much in advance!
andi

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andimeier
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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

So you cannot access the share on a windows system. Is that right?

Can you ping the windows system ok? What version of windows is it running?

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andimeier (andimeier) said : 		#2

I am using Ubuntu Karmic as a server and the Windows XP Professional machine as workstation.

So I am working an my Windows XP Professional workstation and try to get access to the Samba share on the Ubuntu machine. This does not work.

Yes, I can ping from the Windows workstation to the Ubuntu server and from the Ubuntu server I can ping the Windows workstation as well. Seems fine. Besides, other protocols like IMAP, HTTP etc. all are well accessible from the Windows workstation. However, this is no big surprise since they did months before.

As did Samba - it worked on Karmic since I installed it last year but not since yesterday. The only thing happening was the "apt-get upgrade" - so I deem this as the culprit. Could that be?

I would like to give you as much information as possible but I'm afraid the Samba logs keep silent on these connection failures. Maybe you can point me to another source of information for debugging?

Thanks a lot,
andi

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andimeier (andimeier) said : 		#3

Problem solved: after a reboot of the Windows workstation all seems to work well. So, remember: ALWAYS REBOOT YOUR WINDOWS CLIENTS after Samba update!!

What did I do?

1) I started smbd with the debugging parameter -d 10

2) in the log file I now found the following line:

  get_referred_path: |share| in dfs path \server\share is not a dfs root.

(share is the name of the share, "server" is the server name, should be obvious)

When I googled what this message could mean, I came across this thread: http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2007-May/053388.html stating:

"Ah - this explains a lot. The default for the "msdfs root"
parameter changed between 3.0.24 from True to False.

Has this client been restarted since the new Samba
load was added and restarted ?

If not - try rebooting the client. The clients remember
if a server was a dfs root and act accordingly until a
restart."

I did restart - now all is well again.