Usenet newsgroups have always been a great place to get advice on just about any topic. In the past few years, though, this vast pool of knowledge has developed something that has made it into an invaluable resource: a memory. Archival and search sites such as DejaNews (
https://www.dejanews.com) have made sifting through years of valuable solutions on a topic as simple as a few mouse clicks.
The primary newsgroup for Samba is
comp.protocols.smb. This should always be your first stop when there's a problem. More often than not, spending five minutes researching an error here will save hours of frustration while trying to debug something yourself.
When searching a newsgroup, try to be as specific as possible, but not too wordy. Searching on actual error messages is best. If you don't find an answer immediately in the newsgroup, resist the temptation to post a request for help until you've done a bit more work on the problem. You may find that the answer is in a FAQ or one of the many documentation files that ships with Samba, or a solution might become evident when you run one of Samba's diagnostic tools. If nothing works, post a request in
comp.protocols.smb, and be as specific as possible about what you have tried and what you are seeing. Include any error messages that appear. It may be several days before you receive help, so be patient and keep trying things while you wait.
Once you post a request for help, keep poking at the problem yourself. Most of us have had the experience of posting a Usenet article containing hundreds of lines of intricate detail, only to solve the problem an hour later after the article has blazed its way across several continents. The rule of thumb goes something like this: the more folks who have read your request, the simpler the solution. Usually this means that once everyone in the Unix community has seen your article, the solution will be something simple like, "Plug the computer into the wall socket."
