Getting a Simple Samba Setup Running

Samba can be very complex, so it's important to get the simplest possible implementation of Samba running before making major configuration changes.

Caution

I experienced a rare intermittent problem with Samba in which neither Linux nor Windows clients could connect to the server. The Linux clients reported the following error:

error connecting to 192.168.100.3:139 (Connection refused)
Connection to mydesk failed

After placing the following two lines in the [global] section of my smb.conf and restarting Samba, the symptom disappeared:

netbios name=mydesk
encrypt passwords=yes

Surprisingly, removing those lines and restarting Samba again did not resurrect the symptom, so with no current way to reproduce ...

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