What did I do?

[Rahul Sundaram]

Thomas wrote:

>Newly installed Fedora FC4; Samba doesn't work.
>
>The first problem found was in samba logs; can't read secrets.tdb, and
>can't write machine_sid.
>Chmod a+x /etc and /etc/samba seemed to fix that problem.
>Yet smbd runs as root?? and can't read/write root owned
>directories/files?
>Still, Samba shares were not visible, nor accessible from Windows XP. 
>
>Captured packets with tcpdump, and discovered a couple "clueless user",
>(i.e. ME) misconfigured options. Fixed those, and still Samba doesn't
>work. With trial and error, and observation, it appears that it is an
>authentication issue, yet nothing in samba logs. Samba (Fedora) is
>denying access.
>
>Used GUI configuration tools on Gnome desktop. Nope.
>Went through /etc/samba/smb.conf line by line, option by option; still
>nope.
>
>Use setsebool to set samba specific tokens use_samba_home_dirs
>and samba_enable_home_dirs. Doesn't fix it. Use GUI security tool on
>gnome desktop; doesn't fix it.
>
>
>SELinux? Ok, disable that. Still not working.
>
>Download Samba-3.0.20rc2 from samba.org; source and binary. Even the
>newest version doesn't fix problem; Samba share not visible/accessible
>from Windows.
>
>Ok, re-enable SELinux "targeted", using GUI on gnome desktop.
>RELABEL on boot. OK, what ever. "it will take a few minutes". Yeah,
>sure, whatever.
>
>Voila! Samba works! Perfectly!
>Whad I do?
>

Difficult to track down exactly but one guess would be that FC4's 
default version of the targeted policy was not working with samba on 
your system. You did an update on the policy and by disabling and 
enabling it, you activated a relabeling of the filesystem which is 
required at times after a policy update. By doing so you resolved your 
problem.  Another guess is that the newer version of samba from 
samba.org has fixes above the FC4 version

regards
Rahul