Hello all,

since this my first post, let me introduce myself. My name is Peter, I am living in Hungary, and I am a software developer, but with my new job I have to do some network andmistration, too. I am new to Linux.

What I achieved so far is:
I just installed a Mandrake 10.1 box. I have two network cards, and I did plug in one of them to the DSL modem, the other one is connected to a switch, which in turn connects to 5 WinXP clients. Setting up the internet connection and sharing it to the clients was fairly easy with the Mandrake control center.

The problem is:
I want to get Samba working so the clients will have their home directories and a common shared folder on the local network. I know about the Samba config file because I worked with that before succefully. For now, to make testing easier, I used a single "guest ok" public folder. But I can not get the clients to browse my server. I can see the server in "Network Neighbohood" but can not access it. So I tried to ping the machines. The result is:

Pinging the server machine name - the "netbios name" in smb.conf- from XP works just fine.

Pinging the server IP from XP results in "Destination site can not be reached" (or something similar, my XP is Hungarian).

Pinging the XP machine name from Mandrake says "Unknown host".

I assume this is some kind of DNS and/or Routing problem, but I have no idea how to check it. Please give me a clue or refer me to a good doc on the Internet.

Thanks in advance.