Who ordered the scrambled brains?

Ok, I had some frustrating trouble with my computer today so I’m gonna post my resolution here so it can go into Google.

I was setting up Fedora Core 5 on a Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 virtual machine. I used most of the default installation settings, including the ‘Enforcing’ policy set in SELinux. After getting past the virtual display adapter color depth limitation, and setting the background to a solid color (dramatically improving latency), I set out to enable Samba. Should be easy with Red Hat’s configuration tools, right? Wrong. After stumbling around a bit (not used to GUI configuration tools in FOSS OS’), I found this Samba/Fedora guide which provided basic guidance, although I didn’t need to add specific shares because Fedora’s default Samba configuration enables home directory sharing (with an unexpected caveat as you’ll see). When I tried to connect from Windows, however, I recieved “The network path was not found.” So I tried using smbclient from the Samba host itself and got NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME. Grrr. The log displayed:

[2006/04/18 16:45:33, 0] smbd/service.c:make_connection_snum(663)
'/home/mike' does not exist or permission denied when connecting to [mike] Error was Permission denied

That really chapped my hide. The permissions on /home/mike were 700 and ownership was mike:mike. ‘testparm‘ ran without a hitch. ‘smbclient -L localhost‘ returned expected results as well. Finally, after quite a bit of fruitless Google foraging, I thought back to SELinux. I knew that it was a comprehensive security infrastructure, but I had never used it in the past. From the graphical desktop, I navigated to the SELinux configuration tool from the desktop menu bar, System, Administration, Security Level and Firewall, SELinux tab. Then I expanded Modify SELinux Policy, Samba, and found my pot of gold. I put a check in “Allow Samba to share users home directory” and then I was in business. And now, hopefully you are too.

Next steps, XDMCP access and subversion hosting.

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