Samba woes

[Jeff LaCoursiere]

I really do my best to stay away from all things MS, but have recently
been given the task of creating a samba based file server for a small
office environment.  I was pleasantly surprised to find "swat" (it has
been a long time since I did samba!).  I was unpleasantly surprised to
find how !@*^$# difficult it seems to be to get authentication working.

For the record I am on 6.1-RC1 using Samba 2.2.12.  Note that after
updating the ports tree, I could not build samba3... I get some message
about 'sperl should not be run directly'.  Trying to install from packages
failed too - something about the tiff dependancy.  2.2.12 built ok, after
removing the FORBIDDEN line from the Makefile.  Sigh.

My biggest issue is having no idea where to look for log info to debug why
I cannot seem to connect.  I have the log level set to '3', but I see no
info in the various log files I find in /var/log that has anything to do
with the authentication failures.

I cannot get even the simplest setup to function!  All I really want is a
world read/writable share that all office PC's have access to, then each
PC has access to a "home" share based on the user logging in.  According
to the SWAT wizard, this is basically the default.  I have all the UNIX
users in the UNIX password file, the security level set to "user", and
encrypted passwords set to yes.  According to the smb.conf man page this
should be enough.  I try to connect from any PC using the URL \\fs\tmp
(for the world read/write share), which pops up a login box, but refuses
to accept any valid UNIX user/pass pair.  And leaves no log messages
regarding the authentication, even at level 3 (though I do see messages
about the server being connected to, then a normal disconnect).  I even
tried to add one of the UNIX user/pass pairs to the smbpasswd file, which
I thought was only needed if you were creating a PDC, which I am *not*
trying to do.  But that didn't work either.

I guess I am looking for any simple things to look for, or a pointer to
better logging of what is going wrong?

Thanks!

j