Samba configuration on Debian Linux for accessing fileshares from Windows

After much hunting and well written how-to articles, I found that it boils down to this:

1. Either log in as root, or sudo each of these commands.
2. Edit your /etc/samba/smb.conf file to add whatever shares you need to access from a Windows computer. Here's a sample of mine

[docroot]
path=/var/www
writable=yes
invalid users=%S

3. Add a samba user:

smbpasswd -a {username}

4. Restart Samba

/etc/init.d/samba restart

5. Access your new share from Explorer or IE with the IP address of the computer backslash the name of the share. In my case:

\\192.168.1.106\docroot

Windows will prompt for the userid and password. Use the values you supplied to the smbpasswd command. You may have to preceed the userid with the hostname of the server (for example: 192.168.1.106\rick).

Network configuration woes with Debian

Trying to resurrect an ancient computer to use it as a low-powerer (wattage) file server/web server. After install Debian, couldn't communicate on the network.

Used ifconfig -a to show all the network interfaces. For some reason, eth2 was the selected choice.

Edited /etc/network/interfaces and changed references for eth0 to eth2. Then just did a ifup eth2, and behold the transmission of bits over my twisted pairs.

Other good commands to help diagnose the problems:

lspci - List all the PCI devices
lsmod - List modules loaded into the running kernel
modprobe -l - List all available modules