Network file sharing not working anymore - how do I reinstall samba?

frequentbeef

Registered
First off, I should say that I’m a PC guy who’s trying to get used to his Mac and figure out how to make it do what he wants.

So I’ve been having lots of trouble with my Mac mini. I got it this past summer and had various problems. I’d thought I’d gotten them all sorted out until this latest issue.

Here’s a quick summary of what I want to end up with: the Mac mini is supposed to be my TV computer. I have 4 external hard drives connected to it. I need to be able to access and fully manipulate the external drives over the network from a PC.

Enabling the basic samba sharing was easy. I got that working beautifully, but I was only able to access my home directory, not the external hard drives. After investigating on the Internet, it seems that I learned just enough to screw everything up.

I found out that I needed to “just” edit my smb.conf file, but I couldn’t figure out how to find it. It seems I can only get to it via Terminal or something. So I looked for alternatives.

I found a guide on Mac sharing beyond the home directory (http://www.creativemac.com/2002/10_oct/tutorials/samba021007.htm) and installed the Samba Sharing preference pane (http://xamba.sourceforge.net/ssp/index.shtml). This gave me a preference pane with both a GUI and a text editor for the smb.conf file. Seemed like a dream come true. I was even able to specify all the shares I wanted. It seemed simply and easy.

I did run into some trouble when I installed it. I got a bunch of error messages about files not being in their default location or how files needed to be updated. I thought that I had fixed all that, though I couldn’t fix the message about how files needed to be updated.

The problem is that whenever I clicked on “Start”, the entire thing crashes. Further, not samha sharing doesn’t work at all anymore. I’ve tried using the built-in samba sharing that used to work fine, but that does nothing.

I’ve tried removing every trace I can fine of the Samba Sharing preference pane I installed, but that hasn’t changed anything either. When I reinstall it, all my old settings are still there, so there must be some files saved somewhere, but I can’t find them.

I also tried installing Sharepoints (http://www.hornware.com/sharepoints/), but that didn’t change anything either.

Currently, I can’t access the Mac from any PC. I can ping the Mac’s IP fine, but I can’t browse to it on the network nor can I go directly to it. I’m not even prompted to sign in, I just get a message that it’s not valid and I should check the address.

On the Mac, I can access the PC that’s on the same workgroup as it, but I can’t access any other workgroups (which I used to be able to do).

So… what do I do now? I can’t figure out how to reset everything and start over. Right now, I’d be happy with that. Then I can try dealing with the external shares again (and more carefully this time).
 
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