Samba server problem - possible answer to Steven Protter's original prob

[Greg Schmidt_1]

Hi guys,
sorry to barge in the discussion of the SAMBA problem that Steven Protter had in early September about not getting a samba mount on the machine "storage". I am not sure if I got this correct, but it sounded like Steven fixed the problem by reinstalling the Fedora Core OS and things magically worked. I know he also got hints from others (Sridhar and Massimo), but I am not sure if he really got the answer to what might have been wrong.

I think I might have the answer. I came up with a similar problem on my end where I wasn't able to mount via smbfs off of one machine, which was running FC1. I searched the internet for similar discussions based on the error I was getting (

Error connecting to 192.168.1.37 (No route to host)
11415: Connection to 192.168.1.37 failed
SMB connection failed

after involing a mount command in a similar way that Steven was. Anyways, to make the story short, I followed the tip that someone mentioned of using "nmap" on the server. And something interesting came back. I noticed the ports 137-139 were being filtered versus open or closed. That indicated right away that I had a firewall running on that machine, of course. After checking and verifying, I noticed that to be true and ssh and http were the only ones allowed to be accessed. Quickly testing the theory, I shut off the firewall, restarted the samba server, and sure enough I was able to make it mount fine. The only thing I wasn't able to do was restore the firewall to roughly what I had it before while letting through the ports 137-139 (netbios ports related to the samba mounting).

I guess if I had a question for you all, how would I keep the firewall active allowing ssh, http open and then specifying somehow how to let ports 137-139 open?

Steven, I could be wrong, perhaps you didn't have the firewall set on that machine, but that was the case for me. And I certainly had similar symptoms on my connections when mounting via samba.

Any help on the question above would be great. Thanks

[Steven E. Protter]

I just love seeing my name in a subject.

I had a couple of problems that I never posted back into my own thread.

1) There was a firewall on the target box and it did not allow Samba through. I was aware of that, though I may not have posted it and did extensive testing with the firewall down.

2) The major problem was that the Samba version put in Red Hat ES 3 was broken. Its based on 3.0.2a Samba. That release is completely broken and should never have been let out into an Enterprise OS release.

Very interesting information. I'm going to bookmark this thread so I can access it next time I run into this problem.

:-)

SEP