Hi guys
Hate to ask essentially a Windoze question on a 'nix forum but I guess loads of people have had this problem so excuse me for asking it.

I can only seem to get access to SAMBA shares from my Windoze machines if I turn the (Windoze) firewall off.

Windoze version is Windows XP Pro on all the workstations.

The SUSE firewall is fine as you can allow SAMBA connections through it.

I don't really want to do this long term although it's ok if working at home.

This is essentially a Local SUSE server serving maybe 4 or 5 locally (usually wirelessly) attached workstations.

I've read somewhere that I should set up a WINS SERVER but apart from the fact I haven't a clue about this, I would imagine this is rather overkill for what is a purely LOCAL network where all Internet connections go through a single home router.

Any help gladly appreciated.

Cheers

-K

I have found that it helps a lot if you put the names of the machines on your network in the hosts and lmhosts machines on all of the computers on your LAN. Here is an example. One XP machine named xp01 and one Samba server named samba01.
Subnet: 192.168.1.0
Domain suffix: my.place
xp01 address: 192.168.1.3
samba01 address: 192.168.1.10

XP machine
\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
\windows\system32\drivers\etc\lmhosts
Samba server
/etc/hosts
/etc/samba/lmhosts
That solved a lot of problems for me. Also, I found that I have to restart the Windows machines after I restart Samba.

On the Windows machines make sure that the firewall is set to allow file sharing ports through.

Thanks --that seemed to have fixed the problem.

Cheers

-K