Thanks to all your help and some research on my part I'm in business. I made some amendments to my smb.conf file and added a couple of lines to my iptables firewall and now I can see and access my XP computers from the Linux computer and vice versa. Everything shows up nicely on on smb4k. Í'm still working on being able to print from the Linux computer to the printer attached to one of my XP computers, but I'm confident it's only a matter of time.

For anyone else who's having problems with their firewall, here's what I wrote:

iptables --policy INPUT DROP
iptables --policy OUTPUT DROP
iptables --policy FORWARD DROP

iptables -A OUTPUT -j ACCEPT -o lo
iptables -A INPUT -j ACCEPT -i lo

iptables -A OUTPUT -m state --state NEW,RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

iptables -A INPUT -j ACCEPT -p all -s 192.168.0.100/20 -i eth0
iptables -A OUTPUT -j ACCEPT -p all -d 192.168.0.100/20 -o eth0

It was the last two lines that made the other cpomputers on my network available.

Thanks again

Trevor4706

Due largely to all the help and suggestions I've received in this forum my Linux computer is now a fully functioning member of my home office LAN, sharing an internet connection, printer and files. Many thanks to all who have contributed.

I have one remaining issue bugging me. I cannot run SWAT. Every time I enter http://localhost:901 into my browser I get the message "Connection refused when attempting to contact localhost:901".

I have the sneaking feeling I'm missing something very fundamental here. Can anyone point me in the right direction.

Trevor4706

I think you may need to edit the file :

/etc/xinetd.d/swat

and change "disable = yes" to "disable = no".

Then make sure you restart xinetd with something like :

/etc/init.d/xinetd restart

or by rebooting your machine.

Solveit

Thanks for the suggestion; however, I already did that based on some information I found on-line.