Alias cannot be opened?

I give up. I've spent the better part of the last hour trying to get my PowerBook to talk to my Linux box, but it just doesn't want to play ball.

I installed a new hard disk onto my Linux machine and intend to use it to backup my big files on my Mac. So I wrote an entry for the mount point in the Linux smb.conf file and it shows up happily.

When I connect to it through my Mac, I head over to the network and double-click on the icon for the machine. So far so good. It prompts me with a list of mounts to choose and I pick the only one there, which is called "storage" (as it should be called!). A window pops up with the workgroup, user, and password, and I fill in the password, click OK, and boom: "The alias 'machinename' could not be opened, because the original item cannot be found."

And I've tried everything since then to get it to mount but it just won't work. I even clicked Authenticate before clicking the drive, and that seems to work, but whenever I try to mount the drive I get the exact same error. I inspected /var/log/samba files on the Linux box, and all I see (after clearing out the logs and restarting smb) are log.smbd, log.nmbd, smbd.log, and silverado.log. Silverado.log only appeared after I first tried to connect, but both silverado.log and smbd.log are 0-byte files.

So what's going on? You win this round, Apple. I give up trying to guess what it is you want me to do. Anyone have any tips?

Thanks,

Mike

 

There has GOT to be a solution. It's really bizarre to: when I click the Connect button the error springs up IMMEDIATELY. There is no 10 second delay as it tries again and again to connect. It just gives up. I cleared the caches and made sure windows sharing was enabled, but no deal!

 

I went into Directory Access and the following services are ENABLED:

AppleTalk
LDAPv3
Rendezvous
SLP
SMB

I tried going directly to the IP, and that did not work. I looked in hosts.deny and had no problem. Again, it DID recognize the shares available but when I tried to enter my user/pass it just immediately fails. No messages reported in the samba log files. I turned off the firewall on the Linux box just to be sure. Still no deal. /etc/hosts.deny has no entries.

Furthermore, I am in the same workgroup as the Linux machine, if that helps.

 

CASE CLOSED

SOLUTION: I was playing around with the smb.conf settings on the Linux box, and the solution was something I had considered but figured it wasn't a real problem.

Make sure security setting is user and not share!

It's working fine now, yahoo!

Thanks!

Mike