Having trouble connecting a Vista Computer to a Linux Share? Many people are trying to connect a Vista system to a Linux share and are having trouble. There are two possible reasons why the connection is not working properly, assuming you have an inkiling what you are doing. Here is a quick guide to show you how to setup the Samba Share.

1. Windows Vista changes the authentication method for password-protected shares. In XP and previous versions, the system by default used two password hashes, the old-style LAN Manager (LM) and the newer NTLM version 2 (NTLMv2). Older versions of the Samba server in Linux use only the LM hash, which means they have no trouble connecting to a default installation of XP but will fail when trying to talk to a default installation of Vista.

To fix this problem, you need to update the version of Samba on the Linux machine to 3.0.22 or higher. (If you’re using an earlier Samba version, you can downgrade Vista’s authentication to accept LM hashes, using either Local Security Policy Manager or a registry edit.)

2. The second problem is to get Samba configured on the Ubuntu Linux machine. The samba-common package was installed and was at the correct revision (3.0.22–1), but the samba package itself was missing. If you install Ubuntu using the Desktop config you will not have the full Samba package installed.  It’s obvious really….Samba Server doesn’t go on a Desktop.  After I installed the missing pieces, I had one more step to run through.

From a Terminal window, I needed to add a Samba user and password. Windows users are accustomed to having file sharing and authentication handled using the credentials for their user account, but with a Samba server the databases are different. The syntax, in my case, was fairly straightforward:

sudo smbpasswd -a username

In this command, username is the same as my account name. You can create an account for another user as long as they already exist in the user account database.

(Note that you have to respond to three password prompts at this point. The first is for the  password of the logged-on user, and the next two set the SMB password for the user whose account you’re adding.)

After going through these steps, I was able to access shared folders on the Linux machine.

Tags | Linux, Networking, Ubuntu, Windows Vista