Questions about Samba

[Banfa]

So assuming that I manage to read enough of the documentation before I die of old age to work out how to configure a samba server to share files (and printers) on the network with Windows machines will those shares be available with just my computer on without me having logged in?

I am thinking of creating a directory

/Home/Shared Files

to hold the files I want to share. Is this reasonable. The reason for this location is that /Home is a separate drive and in fact the data drive for my machine to allow for OS upgrades while protecting the data and I don't really want them as part of my home directory as they are no my files, they are shared.

[Nepomuk]

That depends on when the samba server is started, but normally you shouldn't have to log in. Check /etc/init.d to find out, what is started at what time (there's a README file there, if I remember correctly, which is normally helpful) and if samba should really not be started until login in the standard setting, change it. (The README will tell you, how to.)

Oh, you'll possibly have to check out runlevels.

If it's Ubuntu you're using, check out Upstart - it's a replacement for the old "init" daemon, however it should be backwards compatible.

Greetings,
Nepomuk