I have problems with my network...

situation is this

there are two computer at home

1. Red Hat 9.0 Samba installed, gateway to the other computer for internet connection

2. A win XP pro thingie connected to the Linux by a direct ethernet cable connection, no hub !


Samba was working pretty fine excpet windows wasn't able to see Linux files because some error like "access denied , autentication error bla bla" I guess this is a common poblem for samba users trying to share with Win Xp pro. I tried to set iptables such that I would allow all pakcages from the winXP's ip, its IP was set as 192.168.0.2 so I learned that I had to write

iptables -A INPUT -s 192.168.0.2 -j ACCEPT

after that probles arised, before I wrote this command I was able to ping WinXP but after this command I lost connection with that I couldn't ping that WinXP anymore. So I wrote

man iptables


to return everything back, I thought this would work

iptables -D INPUT -s 192.168.0.2 -j ACCEPT

but it didn't I am still unable to ping WinXP...

most important then others, I still don't know why? but I cannot login to my X server, it gives an error like,

check your configuration, try to login with a failsafe session and solve the problem

an error like this

In guess I will close all iptables off, I created a thread called iptables but there wasn't sufficent answers for that. Is IP tables a firewall. Aren't there other firewalls which are easier to use..

thanks for the coming answers !

If you didn't save the current running rules rebooting your computer should have set it back to what it was before

It could be a problem with you'r samba setup which I haven't used enough to give any usual thoughts upon

or

hosts.allow/hosts.deny entries could be causing problems

if you've got in /etc/hosts.deny

ALL:ALL

you'll probably need in /etc/hosts.allow something like

smbd: 192.168.0.0/24
nmbd: 192.168.0.0/24

Whenver if've used iptables for a rule like you've done, I've

iptables -A INPUT -p ALL -i eth1 -s 192.168.0.0/24 -j ACCEPT

where eth1 is the one connected to internal computers i.e XP in this case

you haven't specified any -p (protocols) but not being an expert you understand perhaps it's causing the problem