I believe in Vista speak the network location is the TCP/IP domain name while the workgroup is the name of the peer to peer network on top of TCP/IP.

The workgroup setting in smb.conf equates to workgroup in Vista. The domain name is not really meaningful if you don't have DNS for your lan.

Using 'smbclient -L localhost' should tell you the workgroup the Ubuntu box thinks it's in.

Thanks. I'm very confused now that I'm away from the box which parameter's actually set to the correct value, since from browsing the web it looks like it's workgroup. But when you posted I did go in and check the file...

I will smbclient when I get home. Thanks for the instructions.

I really need to learn to not check Woot! unless I am prepared to buy. Today they have a Magellan GPS for $189. I have long wanted a portable GPS. Today will, sadly, not be the day I get one.

WHAT? I really hated having to load maps anytime I went out of the LA basin on my lil handheld GPS. (Can you say Moorpark gig! Oy vey)

It's what the stimulus check is for, right? Lets see... Tires $400, GPS, $194. That leaves $6 to put towards savings. It IS the American way!

I hope it helps, configuring samba is a real pain. I never want to set things up the way the GUI tools want me to. There needs to be a GUI tool to set up samba for the home user, yeah I know my configuration is insecure, I know that it will make network admins cry, but it's my own little private network and I don't care.

You wouldn't have any tips for me on the samba user front would you ( ita "Buffistechnology 3: "Press Some Buttons, See What Happens."" Apr 26, 2008 12:07:35 pm PDT)? I'd like to set up machine accounts for my other computers so I can give them default shares for their backups. It's overkill, I know, but I feel that I've let my sysadmin skills decay to most nothing, and I want some of them back.

To set up a samba machine, do I need a samba user of the same name? To set up a samba user, do I need a Linux user of the same name? Can I forgo passwords on many of these?

Do you want to deal with users and passwords at all? If not, you need to use 'share' level access instead of 'user' level access. That is the part that makes network admins cry.

And now a directory layout question--how do you guys organize your Linux file structure? I mean, if you have files that you want to share across machines (like .avis, or something), do you stay under the /home directory? I'm probably going to drop a /shared under the root and work from there, but I'm curious.

I use a directory (/storage in my case) under root for my MythBox that shares images, audio, and video.

Do you want to deal with users and passwords at all?

I had a passing idea that I'd have users with home shares, but that's strictly for the learning curve, since it's pretty much just me on the network. Honestly, manually picking the share the PC backs up to versus the one the laptop backs up to isn't unworkable workflow--I just thought it would be tidy and worth learning the automatic way.

So, the next purchase I'm probably going to make (aside from upgrading the memory modules) is a laptop cooling pad. I was looking at some in Best Buy today, but they were all 10" pads that looked too small to be really effective for my 17" laptop.

Anybody got any recs?

Also, I downloaded a handy computer metrics dashboard widget that includes temperature readings for several parts of the computer. It's terribly useful, but it leaves me wondering what the normal/ideal operating ranges for those values are supposed to be, and at what point I should sleep/shut down the computer for a while to let it cool off.

In general, I've been extremely conservative, and closing the cover to walk away at regular intervals, but if I'm going to base my decisions off of hard data, I'd like to be able to understand what I'm reading.

Sean, before trying something complicated, check out using Fan Control to modify when and how the fans come on. I've found that playing with the values can help keep a Macbook (Pro) a lot cooler.