forgive my ignorance. I have a server rh9 and and $M xp pro ws. Samba seems to be configures okay. I can access files via command line from the server itself (not exactly what i need but a start) . However when i use a gui browser on the server these shares appear to be of zero size. The shared drive is ext3. can samba read from NTFS, ext3/2, fat etc, etc.
Also should ipmasquerading via a linux server effect an m$ xp workstations ability to share files w/samba. I have been unable to "map network drive" or reach the samba shares via "net use" commands.
any help would be greatly appreciated.

The file system used by the Samba server shouldn't make any difference at all. When you say the shares are zero sized, do you mean its zero when you right click on the share from the Samba server rather than a folder beneath the share?

IP Masq should be completely transparent for 'outgoing' connections, incomming connections won't work though. So if you've got a Samba server behind an IP-Masq router and a Windows box the other side of the router, you won't be able to connect from the Windows machine to the Samba server, but it would work the other way around. If however the Samba server is running on the machine that's acting as the IP-Masq router then it should behave fine.

HTH

Jamie...

linux server + ip masq router into M$ xp2600 pro corp fckgw....

re:When you say the shares are zero sized, do you mean its zero when you right click on the share from the Samba server rather than a folder beneath the share?

I mean that when i click on the ie. "homes" folder in konquerer and that direcory opens it reveals no subdirectories. Nothing inside.
I went ahead and configured the server as dns thinking that it may push the xp client into accepting the linux host. No such lucl because the M$ wont let me select ie linux$ as my domain name it is not read. So i tried to remove my linux (masqued/unmasqued) internet dns from the alternate dns listing in m$ but i subsequently lost my internet feed from the linux router. So now xp has 192.168.1.1 as the primary dns and some other dns from my ip. anyhoo no recognition here.
Perhaps dns is not set up 100% on my linux box. or perhaps im missing something else like nfs on linux.
I mean if smb.conf is cool what else could it be? I double checked the xp reg hacks, the patch applied i can use winvnc from m$ and see whats going on the server but samba... nothing.