Samba shares across domains (?)

[Jorpho]

Here's the story: I have a computer running FC5 in the building where I work. I've installed Firestarter and opened the ports for Samba for a few select computers inside the building running Windows XP, as well as one running some version of Linux that I can SSH to.

Each of these computers in the building can connect to the Samba shares without any problems whatsoever. The problem is that computers outside the building cannot. I've even tried disabling Firestarter completely, but attempts to connect to the Samba server just time out. I can, however, SSH to the computer running the Samba server without problems from computers outside the building (after opening ports appropriately).

I know I must be doing something fundamentally wrong here, but I'm not sure what. I never had to specify any kind of domain when I set up the Samba server to allow the other computers in the building to connect to it, but clearly there is something different about the computers inside the building. I do know that one of the outside computers has a different subnet mask (255.255.255.192 instead of 255.255.255.0).

Do I have to set up the Samba server as a domain master browser or something? And if I do, can I prevent it from broadcasting its presence to anywhere but the select few IP addresses I want to connect to it with?

 

[rzs0502]

Can you connect to the Samba using IP addresses \\x.x.x.x
If you can, then it's DNS related.

Do you have
hosts allow = 127.0.0. x.x.
in your smb.conf?
Samba can restrict IP connections with this setting


"If you always do what you've always done, you will always be where you've always been."

 

[Jorpho]

Thanks for getting back to me. All of my attempts to connect to Samba used IP addresses, actually.

Someone suggested to me that it was quite likely that there was a firewall in the building blocking outside access on the Samba-related ports that would not necessarily block SSH. I came to the conclusion that the only way I could get this to work was to use tunneling. It's a horribly messy business, but eventually I got it to work.

My references:

http://hr.uoregon.edu/davidrl/samba.html

http://lists.isb.sdnpk.org/pipermail/comp-list/2003-February/001853.html

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2004-May/085358.html

I also was looking at

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2002-April/042600.html

, which suggested that I could use port 445 instead of 139, but I didn't bother trying it. (Maybe I should...)