Dec 2008: See the bottom of this post for an update.

I’ve now got an old PC running Ubuntu Server (Dapper). This is partly a bit of “fun”, and also practical; Here are my rough plans:

• Samba server, for file and printer sharing
• DNS for lan names, and forwarding to VPN DNS. There are a number of machines on the LAN.
• Perforce proxy server for VPN work, Perforce server for personal stuff
• Firefly media server for shared iTunes
• Apache web serving, if I get that far
• Anything else that I get around to

So far the experience hasn’t been particularly fun; a lot of google and a lot of experimentation usually works. Though I can definitely recommend the various O’Reilly manuals.

Here are some notes about setting up Samba on Ubuntu for access by XP and Mac OS X. I don’t have clear instructions, as it was a bit hit and miss:

• Created a new group, home, for users accessing the share
• Create linux user to access share; useradd -g home -p password user
• For each system user; smbpasswd -a user

Actually setting up the file share was pretty easy, it was the printing that was hell. The printer is an HP OfficeJet G55 – check out and apt-get hplip. They are the drivers to use.

Other things/sites to check

• http://www.wildfire.dircon.co.uk/hnw-printing.html
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=310450
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NetworkPrintingFromMacOSX – if you want to print from Mac (just edit the /etc/cups/printers.conf file like the comment says). Also see http://mike.hostetlerhome.com/2006/05/09/printing-from-mac-os-x-to-linux/
• Need to run

  /usr/share/cups/enable_sharing 1
  /usr/share/cups/enable_browsing 1

If you get an “access denied, unable to connect”, it might be (as a lot of posts say) that you need to enable “use client driver = yes”. However, what you probably want is for samba to dish out the printer driver to the Windows clients. In this case you need to leave it as “use client driver = no”.

The following site was really useful. If there’s one link to look at from this post, it’s this one: 

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2005/01/13/lnxckbk_samba.html.

Also read the man page for cupsaddsmb. Note that you need to set security = user at first, later changing it.

Here’s an edited smb.conf file, which works for me. I suspect it’s slightly over complex, so comments welcome. It’s really a mashup of several other files, though it did try to create it systematically following the official documentation.