jump to navigation

Not quite what was intended 2007 April 30 22:45

Posted by diamond in : Random , 2 comments

This post was meant to be made on the basis of some notes that i was keeping on one of my palm treos. Unfortunately, i mis-read a dialog box while syncing it to the pc, and had it’s data overwritten by the backup from the other treo. Oh well ,-)

Instead, this post is composed from a couple of things i’ve been meaning to put up here for ELONGTIME.

Firstly, the checkers book. It’s real name is “The Practice of System and Network Administration”, which is a bit of a mouthful if you’re going to refer to it in speech. It’s an excellent book, it’s considered to be the definitive textbook on the title subject, and rightly so. It’s just the name that irks. So, taking inspiration from one of the quotes[1] on the official website, i’ve taken to calling it ‘the checkers book’. This here is my bid to try and spread that a bit -)

The second thing is anonymous samba share browsing for windows clients (it seems like i’m not so good at naming things either). For years it’s been niggling at me that i have been unable to figure out how to get a samba share that windows would be able to browse anonymously. I finally figured it out last summer, and have been meaning to document it ever since. Here’s how it goes.


[global]
...
security = user
map to guest = bad user
...
[sharename]
...
browseable = yes
guest ok = yes
...

So, when a windows user tries to access the share, so long as their windows username is not the same as an account on the samba server, their user will silently be mapped to the guest user by the samba server. Without this, windows will throw up a dialog requesting username/password to access the server, and will never try connecting to the share as guest, meaning you can’t see the share without authentication. The bit i had been missing for years was map to guest = bad user.

And that’s all (s)he wrote.

[1] “Despite sporting a title that sounds about as interesting as The Longest Checkers Games I Ever Saw, Thomas Limoncelli and Christine Hogan’s The Practice of System and Network Administration is an exceptionally valuable book.” The original review that it is from is here.