samba on my lan

I have a pc (or 2) and a laptop that I wish to set up for file sharing between them. I cannot get samba to work on either the pc or laptop. I have followed several tutorials, including the old one from swerdna. There are many unanswered questions in all of them. They all say HOW to designate a domain controller but not under what circumstances I pick one. They say HOW to find WINS but not what to do with it. Opening ports is another issue; as is the setup of the firewall. In my case, starting the daemon fails:

systemctl status smb.service● smb.service - Samba SMB Daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/smb.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Wed 2021-03-24 14:10:02 EDT; 20s ago
       Docs: man:smbd(8)
             man:samba(7)
             man:smb.conf(5)
    Process: 31879 ExecStartPre=/usr/share/samba/update-apparmor-samba-profile (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
    Process: 31888 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/smbd --foreground --no-process-group $SMBDOPTIONS (code=exited, status=255/EXCEPTION)
   Main PID: 31888 (code=exited, status=255/EXCEPTION)
     Status: "Starting process..."


Mar 24 14:10:02 linux systemd[1]: Starting Samba SMB Daemon...
Mar 24 14:10:02 linux smbd[31888]: [2021/03/24 14:10:02.390477,  0] ../../source3/auth/auth_util.c:1402(make_new_session_info_guest)
Mar 24 14:10:02 linux smbd[31888]:   create_local_token failed: NT_STATUS_INVALID_PARAMETER_MIX
Mar 24 14:10:02 linux smbd[31888]: [2021/03/24 14:10:02.390552,  0] ../../source3/smbd/server.c:2055(main)
Mar 24 14:10:02 linux smbd[31888]:   ERROR: failed to setup guest info.
Mar 24 14:10:02 linux systemd[1]: smb.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=255/EXCEPTION
Mar 24 14:10:02 linux systemd[1]: smb.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Mar 24 14:10:02 linux systemd[1]: Failed to start Samba SMB Daemon.

One instruction tells me to make sure nmb is running. Yast says it is, but in the available services in the firewall, nmb is not listed. Also, this shows an error in guest info. I have checked off guest access in Yast–> samba server. I have said all users can use samba. Do I have to add a user called guest to my system? Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

Hi Prexy. Are you sure that you want to set up samba for a domain environment? For the use case you describe, each Linux host could be set up as standalone samba servers.
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting_up_Samba_as_a_Standalone_Server

Hi
There are many alternatives to samba that work OTB, in GNOME Nautilus I just use sftp to connect, or scp from the command line. No configuration required apart from ensuring users are the same… What about nfs or sshfs?

What a disaster! I looked at many how-to’s and wiki’s and forum posts. I could never get smb to start. The error message pointed to an issue with guest. I made many modifications and got to the point, even though I kept original files as xxx.xxx.old, that I thought samba was broken beyond repair. So, I used yast to delete it; assuming that I could re-install with fresh files. I accepted the yast suggestions of what had to come out with samba. It took 133 files with it!

Afterwards, I lost the ability to connect to the lan from my ethernet card. I used a usb wifi dongle to get to my router. I lost lots of gui control. I couldn’t shut down or reboot. I had to power down from the switch on the pc, even though the keyboard was working and I could give the commands to the konsole. In the end, I re-installed Tumbleweed from a DVD. I still don’t have things quite back to where they were, but things seem to be ok. On a positive note, the re-install process refreshed my memory on how to do that carefully.

I think I’ll try file sharing by one of the other methods suggested to me in this thread!

That was drastic. There was no need to remove samba! Instead, you could have shared your smb.conf file for others to review. Or used testparm to check it…
https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/testparm.1.html

I think I’ll try file sharing by one of the other methods suggested to me in this thread!

Yes, for simple file sharing between Linux hosts just use sftp. See my comments in this thread…
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/548356-Link-two-PC-s-together-with-Ethernet-cable-to-transferLeap-15-2-(complete-or-)?highlight=deano_ferrari+file+sharing

Is there a more complete tutorial on sftp? Trying to connect my pc to my laptop fails. On the pc, in Dolphin>Network, I can see the laptop but can’t connect but get the message Connection Refused. Sometimes I get the error message about the key but select “continue anyway” and still that doesn’t work. If I try using

sftp://prexy@192.168.1.101

I get “no such file or directory” no matter if I issue that alone or follow it with a known location such as /prexy/home/Documents. Not sure which zone I should be using in the firewall, so I opened up port 22 on almost all of them. Just for clarification, I used systemctl to start and then get status on sshd on both machines. Both say active and running.

Hi
From the command line can you ssh onto the system…?