Dancing with Samba.. a latin-american adventure

Well, my dear penguins.... finally everything is working.

The story started yesterday morning when after rearranging the 
workstation in the office I got a Pc to use as File server and Printer 
Server.

Installing Mandrake 9.2 took just 20 minutes, the 2 printers connected 
trough usb and also an USB Cd burner were identified and configured 
automatically, so not to much pain for the poor italian penguin.

Mandrake has a simple wizard to configure Samba, file sharing and 
printers sharing. in 2 minutes I was configured properly.
I set up the accounts on the linux machine and the same with smbpasswd

First I tried to connect with my Mac and seemed ok, file sharing fine, 
I could use my personal folder and the public one. Printing was also 
ok, both printer were working and no need driver on my mac as client.

I started to appreciate a lot this latin dance on my linux box, I was 
ready for a merengue when I sat in front of a linux box and than the 
nightmare began.

Fortunately I was not a Lonely Penguin in town, a lot of penguin 
friends came to give me an hand....
This morning with all the emails from my penguins friends printed in my 
hand I started to fight to get all windows workstation working fine.

First Problem:
hostname
localhost is a reserved name a penguin suggested. It's true, this 
doesn't have effect on serious machine like Mac OSX or linux but create 
problems on windows boxes.
Action: I changed the host name

Second Problem:
workgroup
Samba was configured to use the default windows WORKGROUP and this 
didn't cause any problem to the Mac, but you know, even if it is a 
windows default it couse problem on windows boxes.
I changed samba to another workgroup and immediately the windows PCs 
were happy to join it, maybe spending all the time in their default 
workgroup was quite boring so when they saw the opportunity to join new 
people in a new one with some latin music, they immediately came and 
start to enjoy.

The rest of the afternoon was spent to try to print from the windows 
boxes using one of the 2 printers, maybe the boxes were to busy to 
enjoy the music and the nice peoples in the party at the new workgroup.

Ok this is the story, I would like to thanks all the lug friends that 
encouraged my to persevere in this adventure and gave me a lot of good 
suggestion, I learned a lot in this couple of days! thank you all

Samba.... andiamo a ballare!!!!

Ciao a tutti
Matteo

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