I am trying to setup a share on a redhat machine, that can be read by windows machines. I have tried to setup samba and the share correctly but I think my inexperience with linux has got me stuck. Does anyone know of some links that can explain the use of samba, or someone who can kindly explain what i need to do to get a share working and visible. I can ping the machine, but trying to access with \\ ip address\ wont work.

Did you read this?

The Unofficial Samba HOWTO

Get swat up and running, and your life will be happy again. It gives you a control panel for Samba via a webpage. See the man page for swat for more info. Then point your web browser at http://yourmachine:901/ to access swat.

Yeah, more things to go wrong. Great. I've never found swat to be good for initial setup, and I find it to be pointless for config changes.

I'd say ignore swat altogether and just read the documentation.

I just find it faster for me, since I can configure it on the fly from the target machine (usually windows). I thought it was quite simple and easy to use.

Are you able to use [url=http://www.webmin.com/]webmin[/url}?
I've found it easy to set up things in linux in general. There are a few tricks for samba, but it has all the parameters there.

Being that it is a RedHat machine, how is the firewall configured? I know every recent version has had a Firewall on by default during install. Not sure how to turn it off though, as all my installs have been on test networks where I simply disable it during install.

in 'setup' I choose no firewall, but everytime i run 'setup' it seems to reset to high.

Lokkit ('lokkit or 'redhat-config-securitylevel') sets up iptables in RH. You'll want to check what's currently in there ('iptables -L'), and depending on how secure you want it to remain, either add a rule for Samba or remove everything ('iptables -F'). You'll want to check /etc/sysconfig/iptables as well, and clear it out if you're deleting everything.

See here for more info.

God, I hate RedHat. It's turning into Microsoft -- I know what it is you want to do and how to do it! Bastards.

Yep, I can't stand it either. Unfortunately, it's a standard at my company, so I'm forced to use it. (Except on my workstation, I've got Gentoo there. )

Thanks to everyone for the responses, finally got the stupid thing working. The knowlege of the people on this board is pretty wide.