Hey all...

I've used samba between my Windows XP and 2k machines as well as my linux boxes...

I, however, ran into what i find to be an odd problem when using a client prior to win2k.

I am to teach a DOS based programming class (Turbo pascal) and as such have set up "old machines" (233MHZ - 64MB RAM) to run minimum windows 98.

So far i have one machine running windows ME and it browses the network and sees the linux file server on which i'd like the students to save their files. The odd thing is attempting to connect to this machine by double clicking the icon fails. In addition, \\<name of file server> fails. However, if i run \\<ip of file server>, it opens. After that initial run, \\<name of file server> works.

Any advice, suggestions, fixes?

How does the Linux system resolve the name of the ME machine (hosts file, DNS)?

yes there are DNS records for the name resolution.

I maybe should also mention that there are two linux servers one is the DC and DNS server and the other is basically a file server with mostly public shares authing of of the DC. Relevant? Not sure...

Make sure they're in the same workgroup. If that doesn't fix anything, you can run a WINS server on [one!] of the Linux machines. Never run two WINS servers. To run a WINS server, add these lines in the [global] section of your smb.conf:

wins support = yes
dns proxy = yes
name resolve order = lmhosts wins dns bcast

For the other Linux box, if it is also running Samba [you never made it very clear..] add the lines:

wins server = ip.of.first.box
name resolve order = lmhosts wins dns bcast

See how that works, and let me know if you have any more trouble.

Edit: Forgot to mention, make sure you have the Windows clients use the Linux machine as a WINS server. It's in the network config dialogue, under the DNS settings, I believe. I haven't used Windows in years, so I can't be of much help here..

Great!

Thanx alot.

I used my dhcpd server to provide the WINS server info to the clients to i didn't have to figure out where to put it in windows.

Thanx alot!