My office has a Samba Server (Samba) running on a Red Hat Linux 9 System for File and Printer Sharings.

All of our workstations are running on Windows XP Professional System.

Recently, some workstations can connect to Samba while others can't.

I restarted the interconnecting switches and Samba itself but got the same result.

I checked the workstation that can't connect to Samba and found that it can ping to Samba with very fast response.

However, when I tried to stroke the command "\\Samba" under "My Computer" but got the result of "Can't find the computer.".

I tried again using IP Address of the Samba "\\192.168.x.x" but got the same result.

Can anyone tell me how to solve this problem?

Thank you very much!

Best Regards,
Chris.

do you know how the machines are set up? domain or workgroups?

sounds like a networking issue to me.

What about firewalls? Are the firewalls all set up to allow samba connections? Try turning the firewalls off. But don't leave them this way!! If this is the problem, add an exception in the firewall.

Yes, however, the workstations were not set up by myself.

They will join into the domain controller first (Windows Server 2003).

Once they logged in, they will run a startup batch file with the command "net use z: \\samba\share".

The command will fail for some computers and drive z won't be occurred.

I have already checked the "hosts allow" in "smb.conf" and
the range has totally covered all the computers inside the DHCP controller in domain controller.

Did you mean the firewall setting in these workstations (Windows XP Professional)?

Which one should I add in the exception inside the firewall setting?

Thank you very much!

Since some workstations are connecting fine, I will guess that the firewall on the SAMBA server is fine. The firewalls on the xp machines that are trying to connect to the samba server need to have their firewalls checked. The easiest thing to do is to temporarily disable the firewall on the xp clients that do not work and try to connect to the samba share. If you can connect while the firewall is disabled, then the problem is the firewall and you will need to add an exception on the XP firewall.

Thank bob_man_uk & CRC123 very much!

I fixed the problem recently.

The reason was come from the "hosts allow" in smb.conf.

As I wrote before I have checked the "hosts allow" in smb.conf, however, I figured out that the computers with connection problem to Samba Server were having different host number with the computers without connection problem to Samba Server.

The IP Addresses were acquired from the DHCP Server under Windows Server 2003.

DHCP Server helped us a lot in IP Address management, but sometimes it failed.

Finally, I extended the range of "hosts allow" and everything works properly right now.