Looking to have my Mandrake (9.2) machine networked and serve as a firewall within my router to protect and allow ICS with 2 WinXP boxes. How do I do this?

Currently, I have:

1) SMC VBR7004 Router

2) Mandrake Box - 2 NICS installed - one is working fine as Internet adaptor, the other is designated as an ICS adaptor.

3) WinXP - 2 machines, both connected to SMC VBR7004 Router.

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First step: I'm trying to network the WinXP boxes to Mandrake. I have edited the smb.conf file under /etc/samba, but only see the computer show up in Network Neighborhood - can't access it ("duplicate name on network" - which I am assuming is "localhost"). How do I get users and permissions going?

Second step: I'm trying to get the Mandrake box to serve as a firewall within my router to protect and allow ICS with 2 WinXP boxes. Is this the right way to go about things? Or is it pointless since the router is already firewalling my LAN?

Thanks for any help you can give!

Look into your product information - I'm not familiar with SMC routers. Most routers these days, though, have built-in hardware firewalls which are much faster than anything your Mandrake box could do. If your router is one of these, all you'll get by setting up the Manny box as an intermediate between the router and the others is a slower internet connection.

If your "router" is really not much more than a switch and has no firewall, then you'll probably want to set up iptables on the Manny box, connect it directly to the modem, then connect the other NIC to the WAN port on the router and have the XP boxes feed off that.

Cheers,
--Rounan

To get the XP boxes on my network to see my Slack box I had to add the NetBeui protocol to the XP boxes after setting up Samba.

Netizen

Ok - ya I think the SMC Router will do fine .. now to get the Networking running. I can "see" the comp in Network Places, just no permissions to access it due to "hostname is already taken" (localhost?)

Netizen - u running Windows Domain Controller too?

I need some instruction on smb.conf!

Here is the error screen:

http://members.shaw.ca/Fretbuzz/error.jpg

.. any ideas? Is it because the *nix box is setting its netbios name to localhost? Or is it a Windows error. I tried the NetBUI prot. - no apparent effect .. I tried changing the computer name too (as the lousy Windows mssg says) - no luck!

Ok - here's what I want to do:

Have Samba serve as a windows domain controller.

Are there good tuts out there for this?

EDIT:

found this - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...samba-2-6.html

.. is this good, or can u recommend another?

I can't seem to get the Linux box as a netbios NAME!