If you can write and read files, your file-sharing server is alive and well and properly installed on the network. Congratulations and add another notch to your Linux belt. Next you need to add the rest of your Windows clients — one by one:

• Create user accounts on Windows and Linux as needed. Remember that you need identical IDs and passwords on each side. Use the YaST Control Center utility called Edit and Create Users.
• Create shared directories for each user.
• Move the files you want to share onto the server.

Once you have mastered these steps, make sure you learn as much as you can about strengthening network security. Samba and SuSE Linux can provide higher-security methods that you should probably adopt, but that goes well beyond that scope of this article.

If you have trouble accessing the Linux PC over the network, these tips may help:

• Try manually setting the Read, Write and File Sharing permissions on your shared Linux directories.
• The /usr/share/doc directory has huge stacks of documentation. Make a point of reading /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/examples/smb.conf.SuSE. This file helps explain the Samba Server.

References

Samba help is available at O'Reilly Books and at the official Samba organization. Red Hat 9.0 Linux users can refer to the following books: Red Hat Linux Networking and System Administration by T. Collings and K. Wall and Red Hat Linux 9 Unleashed by B. Ball and H. Duff--both available at Amazon.com.

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