smbtar backup/XP

[scratchpadstudios]

Scenario: Unix (Solaris) shop with many SUn machines, and a small group of 3 Windows machines. Several of the Solaris machines have been running Samba (2.2.2) successfully for quite a long time. The Windows boxes were all running W98SE, and backups were being done automatically (and very tidily)via cron jobs, using smbtar to back up the entire C: and D: drive for those machines. Also, they mount a number of shared filesystems from various Samba servers, set up to have no passwords at all. This has worked very well for years now.

Then, unfortunately, an application upgrade required the "upgrade" of one of the Windows boxes to XP Pro.

Problem 1: Despite setting up sharing on the C: drive, and despite setting up my smbtar script to login with the username root and the root password for that share, smbtar cannot back up the drive: there are permissions problems that cause the process to fail. It appears that XP ignores the uname and password for incoming remote sessions, and simply dumps them all in as "guest"...

Problem 2: Trying to access the (passwordless) shares from the Samba servers on the XP box leads to a username/password dialog box each and every time- which gets woefully tiring, when there are many shares. This despite setting up "guest ok = yes", "public = yes". I've tried encrypted and unencrypted passwords, all to no avail.

Searching the archives here, and doing google groups searches, revealed that this is a very common and vexing situation, with a number of (contradictory!) suggestions for workarounds- at least to the password issue... Seems Microsoft decided to abandon networking compatibility in XP. For our convenience, of course.

Does anybody have concrete suggestions on what to do to get that damned XP machine to act like the W98 machines with respect to these issues? I simply want to be able to continue my longstanding backup strategy using smbtar, and I wouldn't mind not having to continually retype passwords to map those Samba shares...

 

[scratchpadstudios]

Following up my own question with a most curious resolution for problem #2: I don't know how or why this worked, but a side effect of a seemingly unrelated change I made has been to allow the samba shares to mount at boot without requesting a password!

The machine in question is being used as a digital audio workstation, so I was following a recipe for optimization of the machine for audio tasks (found on the bluelife audio zone). One item that is suggested there is to disable ACPI, and reconfigure the machine as a "standard PC" with respect to power management. This is intended to prevent Windows from interrupting audio recording work, I'm told.

Once I did this, the machine went through a cycle of reintalling all its drivers from scratch. And when it finished that cycle, the shares mounted right up: no prompt, no complaining. And they continue to mount cleanly with successive reboots. Magic...

I have absolutely no idea _why_ this worked, when nothing else did: my knowledge of Windows guts could be inscribed in pica on the head of a pin. But hopefully, this info will help someone else out...