Hi

I can see my linux server in network neighbourhood but when I click on it I am warned that "computer or sharename could not be found".

nbtstat -a 10.0.0.2 (my linux server) returns "host not found" but the same command against my other w98 desktops yield expected responses.

I can see my Linux server and ssh to it no problem, but if I ping I need to issue ping mylinuxserver.lan (doesn't work without .lan whereas it works ok for other windows 98 machines - DNS is my ADSL router as far as I can understand - I can see lan configured there as domain name).

I can also run smbclient on the linux server and get into the shares that way by providing my username, password & workgroup.

Any ideas what could be wrong.

Thanks.

Well it's funny how it works out in the end. I'm replying to myself because having struggled with this problem for days (since upgading to RH9), I've worked it out.... by chance.

Now tell me I'm not mad but the RH firewall used to be controlled using "ipchains" (either that or I've lost my marbles or I aliased it and totally forgot). When I type "ipchains" in RH9, nowt!!! error!!! command does not exist. So I assumed I hadn't installed the firewall and didn't investigate this avenue further.

But a few minutes ago I'm reading about the iptables command. Huh?! I try it out and I don't believe it.

So I temporarily flush my firewall setings, and voila, I can access my shares from windows 98.

I hope this helps someone else. Now all that's left to do is find out which port to allow in from my desktops.

Cheers

If I understand you correctly you could see the server in the workgroup from network neighborhood right? So netbios is picking the name up ok. Don't worry about that part of it.

Silly thing about windows -> samba
The error messages you see in windows are not usually what the problem is. In fact, I don't think it ever gets them correct.

What windows meant to say is that windows users are not authenticating to the linux box. You will need to add users to the linux box with the same name and password you have on Windows. Then in the smb.conf do something like this:

[MyShare]
comment = Name of share
path = /var/myshare/somewhere
valid users = administrator user1 user2 (windows login info)
public = no
writable = yes
printable = no
create mask = 0640


That is the easiest way to be able to grant them authentication to the shares. And you can map them to your windows clients as mapped drives after getting them authentication. You can also use smbusers, and smbpasswd, but I have had mixed results with it.

If you still have problems, make sure to cut and paste a cleaned up version of your smb.conf file, and I will try to help.

Happy file sharing!