Greetings, Let me first start off by saying that I am impressed with the amount of help I am seeing in this forum. I hope to be able to be of some sort of help to someone eventually, as I am now seeing how frustrating this migration can be for an XP user.....

Alright, here's the deal. I recently installed Fedora 3 on a fresh machine. PIII 500mHz, 396mb, 120Gb HD, ATI Radeon 8500DV, Awe64 Gold ISA (I know, its a dinosaur..Still not working right), standard 10/100 NIC, USB 1.0, (That I would eventually like to use my Audigy 2nx on, but first things first.)

So, that's the machine... Here's the problem I'm having.

I have two XP machines, (identically configured except for the name of course). These two machines both get internet from a Microsoft Wireless Base Station, one wirelessly, and the other is wired. The wired desktop, Lets call it (DESKTOP) has an HP printer connected to it,(Lets call this HP) both XP machines can print to this printer. To try and avoid confusion, lets call the other machine LAPTOP.

1) My recently built linux machine can now also print to HP, can see DESKTOP, AND access the shared C drive on that machine. Wonderfull!! There is something wrong though, and I obviously don't know what it is, or I wouldn't be here looking for help from such a helpfull crowd. From DESKTOP, I cannot see the LINUX machine, or add it with the windows 'add a network place' dialog' window, by using the machine name or the IP....

2) LAPTOP _can_ see the Linux machine, but doesn't have permission to connect to it. Linux machine CANNOT see LAPTOP....

*NOTE* There was a brief moment when all three machines were able to access each other, but then I rebooted, and I never saw that magic again. -Sigh-

I feel very comfortable with Windows networking, and based on that knowledge, have plowed right into this without any prior linux experience. Now, unfortunately, I fear I may have gone too far, and gotten myself into some trouble by reconfiguring the wrong options, too many times. Sound familiar?

What I am looking for I guess, unless someone is willing to help me step by step, is a good how-to, specifically for Fedora 3, on connecting to an existing Windows network. If there is a kind soul or two here that would be willing to help me through this I would greatly appreciate it, as using a HOW-TO from this point might prove difficult with all of the steps I have already been through.

I have read through many of these posts already, and I have seen some frustration by the newbies and the veterans when it comes to helping some people on here.... I am willing to try whatever you tell me and give you specific results. I am patient enough to try a number of things, or even step backwords, the only thing I am trying to avoid is having to reinstall fresh. It took about 5 hours on a PIII for the full install of FC3, which at the moment, I have decided I want the full install of this distro, at least to start with.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and many thanks in advance for anyone willing to take this on.

Greg

Well, I think you are way above me here. The only thing that I can think of is that for your XP machine to see a Linux folder, the Linux folder has to be accessed by a Samba server (probably on the same Linux machine). I hope that points you in the right direction, and good luck.

Thanks,

I'm not sure if you are talking about adding the linux folder as a host in the samba config?

If so, then I could use some help with that!

Just curious, is samba that big of an issue that nobody can reply? Or am I just missing the multitude of previous threads on this topic and it's already been ground into stone?

I have searched for threads on this topic already, and everything I have found either doesn't relate to the issue I am trying to resolve, or doesn't seem to be working for me.

The odd thing is that I can see one machine and not the other? how can that be?

When you say that LAPTOP sees LINUX - how does LAPTOP see LINUX? I suspect that LINUX speaks to LAPTOP with a wireless protocol to announce its existence. You cannot look at LINUX folders from a Windows system on a network without the LINUX folders running on Samba.

You could try this experiment. Run ping from LAPTOP to LINUX. Better, run Apache on LINUX and see if LAPTOP can browse the Apache server on LINUX. Either one proves that you have network connectivity between the two.

Then try the same experiments with DESKTOP. Can DESKTOP ping LINUX?

Thanks for the reply again!

I think I wasn't being to clear about what I meant by 'see' I was able to ping LINUX from LAPTOP and DESKTOP. I could ping LAPTOP and DESKTOP from LINUX. and yes, the problem was in the samba shares..

I was recently told about SWAT by a friend of mine, and YOWZA, Kazaam! *POOFTA*

All is good and groovy.....

I wish I had just come across SWAT a few days ago... much easier to figure out, with a help file on EVERY option....

Thanks for the help

Well, no problem, but I don't think I helped that much. What is SWAT and where could I find out more about it?

As far as I know, here is how I accessed it. I am using Fedora 3.

I opened a browser window (Firefox)

and type in this address

127.0.0.1:901

It has a very easy to use interface... with help topics on each option... Basic and Advanced modes as well...

Good Luck

SWAT is a GUI frontend for samba. It runs on port 901, you could also get to it with http://localhost:901. It is very helpful for peoples first excursions into samba, as it defines anything you want defined, and caters to recent Redmond converts by not requiring you to read and edit config files.

Peace,
JimBass