I have 7 computers on the network. My computer has a wireless card which connects the computer to the main router. A crossover cable from my computer is then connected to my linux machine (running Simply Mepis 3.4). I have set up Samba sharing on Mepis and my computer connected by the cross over cable can browse and edit the network files. However the other 5 computers on the network, which are connected wirelessly are unable to access the Linux machine Samba shares. All of the network has been set up properly since all the computers are able to share each others files. However just the linux machine cannot be seen.

How can I sort this problem out?

Mike

Can you ping the samba server from the machines that can not see the shares on samba?

Have you added users on the samba server for each user that wants to connect to samba?

I can ping the server but the requests time out from the other computers.

No, I havnt added users to the samba server. What does that do?

The other computers that 'time out', are these the ones that can not see the shares? If yes, you have a IP connectivity problem to fix first. You will not see any shares until you can ping the samba server form any machine you want to connect from. If you need some guidance, please tell me how you are assigning IP addresses, and your hardware configuration. From what you have said so far, I know you have a router, how is that configured? I suspect a large part of the problem is the fact you have attached the samba server to 'your machine wiht a direct cable' and not to the router. Your machine will have to route the packetts from other machines to the samba server. What are you running on 'your machine' for a system?


Adding a user to samba allows the user to log on and use the shares. Windoze networking is wide open and doesn't use hardly any security by default. Samba and the linux community is more secure. The default ( as far as I know ) is a user would have to have a user/password in order to connect to the share and use it. I know you can make it work without any user/password, but that is not recommended. The user/password is added with 'smbpasswd' command.

Lets fix the IP problem first, then we'll see what does and doesn't work.

Yeah the machines which cant ping the server are the ones which cant see the shares.
At the moment all the IP address are assigned by DHCP. The samba server is connected through a cross over cable into the Windows Xp computer. The windows computer connected can browse the files etc, but all the other computers connected by wireless cannot. How can I get my computer to handle the packets sent to the samba server? I know how to make changes to the router but im not sure of its set up.

Thanks for the help, as you can tell im new to all of this!

Mike

Well, the easy thing to do would be connect the samba server to the router directly. Once that is done, you should be able to ping from any machine to any machine.

If you decide you don't want to do that, you will have to figure out how to get windbloze to forward the packets to the samba server. That would imply you need windbloze to route the packets. Linux could do it, because you can update the kernels routing table. I don't know how to do that in windoze, or if it can be done. Windoze can 'share' a connection to the internet. If the linux box can get to the internet now, then you have the shared connection working. Let us know which way you decide to go.

Plugging to the router would be too tricky since that resides in my dads office.

I have already set up a shared internet connection and the Linux box is able to access the internet. Ill have a muck around with windows. I have already ajusted windows xp registery so that it acts as a router, ill investigate the problem further.

Thanks for your help!

Mike