I am using a Netgear FVS318 VPN/Firewall as a gateway to the internal LAN. I am using the Netgear ProSafe Client software to connect to the LAN.

I have no problems connecting to the VPN. I can ping network resources with no problems. I can telnet and ssh LAN resources from the remote (XP laptop on broadband wifi). I can VNC computers on the LAN as well. I can create a share on an XP box on the LAN and map that to the remote, but I cannot do the same with shares on the samba server.

I am using \\ip\share when trying to map drives.

Samba is running on debian.

Any ideas?

hi,

not much of information, so what does the error said?

If I do it through the GUI on the remote laptop...

Right click My Network Places -> Map Network Drive...
Folder: \\192.168.1.5\share

"The mapped network drive could not be created because the following error occurred:
The specified network name is no longer available."

If I do it through the command line...

net use z: \\192.168.1.5\share

I get...

System error 64 has occurred.
The network name is no longer available.

I can ping 192.168.1.5 just fine from the remote. Local hosts on the LAN can map to the share with no problems. It's only over the VPN that I get these errors.

I connected the remote pc to the LAN and mapped \\192.168.1.5\share to the laptop. This worked fine.

I then unplugged the laptop from the LAN and connected to the broadband wifi carrier followed by opening the VPN connection.

I opened windows explorer and clicked on the mapped drive and got the following error:

"An error occurred while reconnecting Y: to \\192.168.1.5\share

Microsoft Windows Network : the local device name is already in use.
This connection has not been restored."

But I can browse drives that are shared on an XP pro box.

As a side note, there are no firewalls enabled on any of these machines.

Are these two network segments on separate subnets.

The two error responses you saw are unrelated. I had the second one at work without a vpn. You need to unmap the Y: share before trying to remap it.

The Samba 3 HOWTO & Reference has info about cross subnet browsing in it's browsing section. On solution is to run a wins server on each subnet. Samba can do this with "wins support = yes" in smb.conf. However you can only use one samba wins server per subnet.

The Samba3-HOWTO.pdf is provided by a samba-doc package or from their website.

Local LAN is 192.168.1.x
WAN is static from ISP

Remote WAN is dynamic from ISP.

This is a remote laptop (i.e. mobile user) so there's no real place for a wins server on the remote.

I'm trying to map the drives via IP and not NetBIOS names. Is there anything else that could be causing this? Or any other info I can provide to help figure this out?

hi,

it seems that you are trying to mount something that isnt there anymore - it did happen sometimes - so, release the net drive - and try to create a new net drive - if it still cant get connected then pls check your samba server config (who are allowed to connect to the share, which ip or interface it listen to etc), or try not to use simple file sharing on the xp box since it using different user/pass authentication then linux - just for simplicity.

HTH.

Unfortunately, it's there and the windows error just doesn't help to diagnose the real problem. I am at work while I am doing this and can access/disconnect/map to the share with no problem on my pc. The laptop next to me is on a cellular broadband and cannot connect to the share.

The share I'm trying to connect to basically allows everybody to access it. To the best of my knowledge it is configured correctly. I inherited it several years ago and have made no changes to it.

I disable simple file sharing on all xp machines in the company.

I'm also interested in any workarounds as well.

I'm not getting how your VPN is setup. For VPN you normally use a private subnet address on your machine and use the VPN device's IP for the default gateway. The VPN device has a public IP address on the WAN side and connects to another VPN device at a remote location. Inside the tunnel private address are used, although they are on different subnets to allow routing ( and connecting to local devices on the same subnet ).
Does your modem have a virtual device which should have local IP address? This one should be a private address.
So you could use a static private IP address on the client, while the modem's internet IP address could be dynamic.

Running wins on the Samba server may help with browsing. Also look in the Samba documentation. A work around is to edit the LMHOSTS file. Using your clients & samba's static address in the respective LMHOSTS file may help work around the subnet/browsing problem.

I figured it out. The ip scheme was not included in the "hosts allow" on the samba server (slaps hand to forehead).

Thanks for the help/ideas though...