Alright: I'm running RedHat 8.0 and everything was working fine. I installed samba and got it working with xsmbrowser, browsing a small home network of windows boxes.

I'm running my internet through a proxy, however, and seemingly without doing anything on my end, everything suddenly stops working in the middle of a browsing session. Xsmbrowser is unable to locate domain master and says the network is unreachable. In the network preferences, eth0 is deactivated and won't activate.

I think someone might have run the network wizard on an XP box I was connecting to, but I'm not sure if it would've had any effect...

Any help would be great, I'm pretty lost.

If your XP box was acting as a DHCP server to your linux box it is possible.

Try using a fixed ip if you aren't already doing so.

Ah, tried and only marginal luck. Eth0 is active but not much else seems to have changed. I still get error 111: connection refused.

If it was a problem with changing a setting on the XP machine (which was a dchp server), can that setting be restored?

I'm not sure - I think XP acts as a DHCP server when it has ICS (internet connection sharing) active.

Personaly I would put fixed IP addresses on all machines on the network. I generally find performance more reliable.

Can you still browse the network from other windows machines? If not the browser service (http://www.duxcw.com/faq/network/bm.htm) may have crashed.

What about ip addresses? Can you ping the IP of the computer you want to connect to with samba? I take it when you set up an IP manually it was in the same range as your windows boxes?

Alright: I' ve no problem with pinging the computer I want to connect to, which was not possible before without a fixed ip, but I still get a strange string of errors trying to browse it with samba and access its connection through a proxy.

something like:

"querying MSHOME on 192.168.0.1
wins_server_died(): Could not mark WINS server 192.168.0.1 down.
Address not found in server list.
name_query failed to find name MSHOME#1b
Failed to find domain. Now using wins server on domain master.
spawn nmblookup -d 1 -A 192.168.0.1
looking up status of 192.168.0.1"

Ah, sorry about all this: thanks so much for your help.

It could be a problem with the name resolution. can you access:
smb://ip.ad.dr.ess/share/

rather than:
smb://compname/share/

There is a good samba doc that talks about getting samba working with windows.
http://us3.samba.org/samba/ftp/docs/...h-Windows.html

No luck.

Konquerer suggests that there might be no Samba service running on the host, though. That seems like something.

I assume that file and printer sharing is installed but what protocols are used on the XP machine? the linux box will only use TCP/IP so I would suggest remving all others unless you require them for something else.

I'm affraid that's me for the night - I'll check back tomorrow though.

Ah, thanks. I'll try that and be off to bed myself.