Image via Wikipedia
While what I got today is nothing serious, nothing that has not been extensively documented elsewhere, I thought I’d sum up all the necessary steps in one place to save somebody the trouble of looking into many different websites to accomplice a relatively simple task.
The Story: I have three external drives on my PC (now running Linux Mint 11) that I needed to be able to access from a Windows 7 machine, serving the role of my Media Center. You can read why I chose Win7 for Media Center here.
The problem: I could not activate File Sharing on Mint. The option under “Preferences”, “Personal File Sharing” was grayed out.
The Solution: For some reason, completely unknown to me, you need to install a couple of Apache packages first. Insane, I know, but that’s what Jeffrey Charles suggested over at Beyond Technically Correct and I had no reason to doubt him. So open a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install apache2.2-bin libapache2-mod-dnssd
After installation was finished, I rebooted my machine (not sure whether I needed to do that or not) and finally I was able to enable Personal File sharing. I went to my three disks, I created the shares and then I went to my Windows machine and tried to add them as network drives. Guess what? No luck. Fortunately, I remembered that the last time I had set up a Samba server, I needed to make a couple of changes in a file somewhere. In case you are wondering, when you check the checkbox to enable file sharing, what you really do is set up a Samba server on your machine.
You need to edit the following file to reflect your own network: /etc/samba/smb.conf
Locate the line bellow and change WORKGROUP to the name of your workgroup. If you never changed that, you do not need to do anything here.
# Change this to the workgroup/NT-domain name your Samba server will part of workgroup = WORKGROUP
What I did next, was to scroll a bit down and locate the authentication section. Then, I uncommented the security = user line. Remember, if you do that, you need to make additional user accounts on your machine, for every other user you want to allow to access your shared folders.
# "security = user" is always a good idea. This will require a Unix account # in this server for every user accessing the server. See # /usr/share/doc/samba-doc/htmldocs/Samba3-HOWTO/ServerType.html # in the samba-doc package for details. security = user
The last step you need to take, is add the allowed users to Samba. Open a terminal and type:
sudo smbpasswd -a [username]
Please note that in case you enabled the security = user option above, you will have to provide a username that can also log on to your machine. I added myself for example.
Edit: I forgot to mention that after you change the configuration file you need to restart Samba, for the changes to take effect. you can do that by typing in a terminal “sudo service smbd restart” or by restarting your machine.
That’s it. I was then able to access my drives from Windows and mount them as Network drives.
RosenRed 
Thanks so much! There is a ton of information out there, but yours is short, sweet and to the point.
Thank you very much! I hope I helped 🙂
Since Debian 2.0 I have been fiddling with various distros, but have never successfully networked with a Windows machine until today. A million thanks to you!
At the end where it says [username] , Who’s username? The windows 7 PC username, the linux server username? Please clarify. Apart from this it’s very helpful, thankyou. To be fair I’m a linux newbie so I have no idea what’s going on cus I spent too long administering a windows 2000 network.
If you enable the security = user option, you must provide a username that is also a user on the Linux machine. In my case, I use the same username for both Linux and Win 7 so I added that.
If not, you can make any user you like and then use these credentials on the Win7 machine. It does not have to be a windows user however.
Can this setup be used to send files from windows 7 to linux as well?
Yes it works both ways. You will have to setup a shared folder in your home directory but I believe this is fairly easy (something along the lines of right clicking and choosing share this folder) 🙂
Amazing blog! Is your theme custom made or did you download it
from somewhere? A theme like yours with a few simple tweeks would really make my blog jump out.
Please let me know where you got your design.
Thanks a lot
The reason why this works is that libapache2-mod-dnssd installs avahi-daemon as a prerequisite. This is what is really needed because it makes it possible to resolve dynamic ip-addresses on a LAN. A lot of things are going to work as they should after installing avahi-daemon, including cups servers with versions higher than 1.6.
It is in point of fact a nice and helpful piece of info.
I am satisfied that you simply shared this useful info with us.
Please stay us up to date like this. Thanks for sharing.
Was in actual fact shopping for just an average shower enclosures during which I stubled onto this web site,
wouldn’t have any idea there was any such thing as a ‘steam shower enclosure’,
wow, might just may have to buy one
If you are dwelling tight financially then kitchen cabinets maybe you can repurpose them in some creative way.
Now, you no longer use kitchen cabinets and bake ware
that you only slightly tighten these screws on the top
layer of paint onto the cabinets. As a matter of fact, there is kitchen cabinets plenty of
room for everybody. A fun way to spend a great deal of time.
Perhaps the most prominent feature of any kitchen. So when looking for solutions in your new appliances or identify modifications
to your kitchen décor.
Great website plenty of terrific steam shower info here
So there could be plenty more gains on the way, before the fun ends.
Running and administering a server can be difficult as well as costs money.
Meanwhile, the teams can practice while basketball people from around the country flock to LA for the jobs.
Tom Delay is a previous House Vast majority Chief and a Texas native.
There’s not too much to be said about Flying Lotus that isn’t obvious in transient beats and whatnot.
With weight coaching, it’s slightly different.
http://prizeegenerateur.fr/