Configuring Samba

I followed the instructions in the wonderful SMB HOWTO¹ for the basic configuration. The netbios lines were already in my /etc/services, and I uncommented the relevant netbios lines from my /etc/inetd.conf. They differed slightly from the ones in the HOWTO ...mine looked like this:

netbios-ns      dgram   udp     wait    root    /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/nmbd -a
netbios-ssn     stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/smbd

I think these lines are for running samba servers, which I'm not trying to do (I just wanted to access samba shares as a client machine). You probably don't need them if you're just a client machine, too, so you could safely skip this section.

I didn't need to do anything to my /etc/samba/smb.conf file (note the slightly different location -- no longer is it just in /etc) -- I chose to manage it with dpkg, and it generated a great one for me.