I'm esperiencing a strange behaviour of win about network communication while trying to access samba-shared stuff on the linux server

I successfully authenticate and get a list of shared folders but when I try to access one of them apparently the explorer window hungs
the thruth is, it doesn't properly hang, but after some minutes (I'm talking about 10 to 20 minutes!) it starts working as it should: I can browse and manipulate files as expected
I remember experiencing this win a win-win connection with the same hardware on my side (a Broadcom 4401 ethernet card integrated on a A7v8X mobo) some months ago while the other pc was able to accessinstantly my shared stuff

is it a known problem? if not are there chances that's an hardware prob instead of winxp malfunctioning? how can I check it using linux instead of win (I've debian installed on this system too)

what does the smb.conf look like?

if you have the proper users set up you should be able to access samba shares. what does

smbclient -L //smbserver

return, how about

smbclient -L ip address of server

return, also what happens if you type in the address bar from windows explorer the ip address of the server?i.e.

from the windows explorer address bar type

\\ip address of samba server

good luck.

do you need the full smc.conf? (howaver after said amount of time everything works fine until I 'disconnect', then I've to start again)

from linux both smbclient calls instantly return data about the samba server (and it seems all right)

from win, using just the ip I've the same result: I can instantly access the list of shared folders on the remote server but it hungs for a random amount of minutes when I try to accesso one of them

the full smb.conf would be helpful diagnosing the problem. what is the network topology, how are the machines connected? are you running a fiewall on either machine?

smb.conf is plainly the default one with just the right workgroup set and "security = user" uncommented out (I avoided to paste it here since it's quite long, but I can do it if necessary)

I have 2 pcs and 1 router connected through a switch, the only firewall is on the router (winxp internal firewall is disabled). samba server is on PC2 (debian only, headless pc), PC1 has both winxp and debian. the router acts as a DHCP server but both PCs have their static lan ip (PC1 is 10.0.0.1 and PC2 is 10.0.0.2, while router is 10.0.0.138)
every other interaction from PC1 to PC2 gives no trouble (from ping to ssh etc)

try this, uncomment this line

#SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192 socket options = TCP_NODELAY

you could also try adding the machines in ? to you /etc/hosts file, syntax would be

ipaddressof machine name.

good luck.