*smacks head*

I solved this with....hold on to your horses....

mkdir /var/run/samba

Incroyable mais vrai. Things work now.

San

wow.

mkdir /var/run/samba did the trick. now, all machines can see each other. my firewall is still disabled however so i need to make sure everything works properly with the firewall up.

thanks for the tip, celettu!

now that i can see the xp box on the suse, i can't access it:

Unknown error condition in stat: Connection refused.

stumped again.

What does the Event Log on the XP box say? (Control Panel=>Administrative Tools=>Event log is there somewhere). What do the logs in /var/log/samba and /var/log/samba3 say?

apparently those logs don't exist

and where in this event log should i be looking? under all three categories (application, security, system) i don't see any events committed by a computer other than the xp itself; under security, it says that there are no items to view.

Well, I'm not the network guru who runs the Win2K box on our network, but I asked him, and the most likely place this would be recorded would be the security log... but the security log is not enabled by default (the Admin has to turn it on specifically). But it is supposed to record stuff like failed logins and such (which this would count as, I suppose--we'll test it in a minute).

You turn it on in Administrative Tools=>Local Security Settings=>Select a policy and check the "Failure" box to log... failed logins.

Hang on.... Yes, that works. I just tried to access the workgroup using an incorrect password, and two log entries appeared in the Security Log saying that... someone tried to log in to a specific account with the wrong password or username, and that there had been an authentication failure.

So you might want to try that, and see if it helps you track down what's going on on the Windows end, if Samba seems to be working correctly. I don't know why you wouldn't have any logs for Samba; that seems odd, but offhand I don't know what to do about it.

motub,

thanks so much for all your help.

i tried what you said on the xp end, but quite frustratingly, i've found that smb and nmb are not running again. testparm returns no errors. i'm now completely confused about what's going on with this system.

-smb and nmb are enabled to start during boot
-on boot, smb and nmb apparently start without a problem
-yast tells me that neither daemon is running
-starting manually doesn't work
-the network, which formerly worked, then didn't, then showed up but returned an unknown error, is back to not working
-testparm returns no errors
-i can connect to the internet without a problem

You have 2 network cards in your PC (one connected to the modem, and one connected to the network) or only one (and you get Internet via routing from the XP box)?

'Cause I'm thinking that either 1) there's a problem with your NIC (the network NIC)-- but that won't be the case if you get Internet from the XP box;

2) there's a firewall on the network somewhere (can't begin to guess which box, but I'd vote for the XP box, especially if you did a Windows Update or installed a Service Pack) that is stopping/blocking the internal network connections.

Stabbing wildly in the dark, this sounds like everything starts out working, and then is stopped... by the network going down? Which might cause both the Samba daemons to stop (sounds odd, but on the other hand, there's no use in them running if there's no network, and they do re-read their settings every minute or so)?

Does SuSE install a firewall by default? Have you configured it, if so? Have you checked your physical network connections (are all the cables securely placed, etc)? Can you try another NIC (maybe the one you have is going wonky)? Have you checked the SuSE site to see if there's anything that might be a little bit broken with regards to network connections or their implementation of the Samba server daemons?

This is pretty bizarre.

The SuSe 9.1 firewall blocks samba by default, so I had to turn it off. I'll have to configure it, but I haven't figured out yet and I'm behind a router anyway so it's not that urgent. But with the firewall switched on, the network isn't found.

just one network card in the pc. i have cable internet that goes from the cable modem into an 8 port hub and then out to the three computers on my home network (2 xp's and the suse)

i'll double-check when i get home (at work now).

this is what really puzzles me. the samba daemons both supposedly start during boot without a hitch, but then i view them in yast and they're not running for some reason. i haven't made a single change since before they were running.

it does, and it was giving me issues before so i just turned it off. my network wasn't up long enough for me to test my connections with the firewall enabled.

everything is good to go.

i have one here that i've been looking at the whole time; i'm going to give it a shot soon, maybe tonight. i just want to have explored every config option and possible problem.

not thorougly so i suppose i will look around a little more.

indeed.