Hi,
I'm running Mandrake 10.0 with gnome WM. I can run Smb4K (even though it looks likeit's menat for KDE and not gnome?), but when scanning the network it doesn't see my windows 98 box (both are plugged into the same router). Even when I ping the IP address of the windows box I get no response. If I boot into XP instead I can see the other box on network neighborhood no problem. I've tried the samba command-line utilities as well with the same results, it can't find my other machine.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Is your network otherwise fine ? (i.e. can you see other computers, browse the net etc.) I'm not that familiar with Mandrake, but from memory you will also need the samba filesystem installed - not that that should have much effect on pinging the local machine of course.

Yup, no problems, I can even ping other addresses (google, etc.), but not my local box. I assume this has something to do with the router giving "local" ip addresses to machines (so samba/ping/etc isn't "seeing through" the router), but I'm not sure how to test this theory or fix the problem....

Oh bugger

Will have a think, and get back a bit later. Can you set static IP's on the router ?

I don't know how to do that off-hand, but it may be possible, I'm not sure...thanks for having a go at it!

Sorry, haven't had much luck at this end. My only thoughs are that either the router's giving the Win98 box an odd IP address (would a class C address be viewable ? Not sure). Perhaps if you have a close look at the network when XP & 98 are running, and then compare the IP addresses to those assigned when XP is replaced by Linux, things may become a bit more clear. Lastly, it shouldn't but may make a difference in which order you boot your machines - 98 methinks can be a bit odd in this respect.

Good luck, and let us know how you get on

Cheers,

mj

Reviewing the facts:
The MDK PC is dual boot with XP.
XP can can see the 98 box but MDK can not.
Both PCs can access the internet.
Both PCs are configured for DHCP.

Hmm... seems strange that you can not ping nor access the 98 box.
Are the 98 shares password protected?
Are you running a firewall on the MDK box.
Do you have the correct IP addresses for the PCs?

Have you tried pinging the MDK box from 98?

Yup, the facts are all correct.

The 98 shares are password protected, but from my experience at work samba (or at least Smb4k) will prompt for passwords if necessary (though I haven't done it with win98 specifically).

As for the firewall, I don't think so, but to be honest I'm not sure...if I load up the security configuration in MCC it has the "no firewall" box checked. Is there a better way to tell? I'm new to linux and networking.

The IP addresses are correct, and even if they weren't I should be able to locate the win machine by name, which doesn't work either. Also, when Smb4K scans for other smb machines it doesn't find anything.

I'm pretty sure I did the reverse ping test (from the windows box) and didn't see anything, though I can double check that later...

Again, I'm no expert, but I'm guessing this has something to do with the router...don't routers assign local IP address that are "hidden" from the rest of the internet? For some reason, it seems like linux can't see "through" the router to my other machine, though it can see through to the internet....

Typical router like Dlink assign local IP addresses of 192.168.x.x. If one of your PCs was not being assigned an addresses then I would not expect them to be able to access the internet.

So post the IP addresses of the MDK and the 98 PC.

The problem may be in the networking configuration of the Win98 box.
Have you installed NetBIOS on the Win98 box? (This is required for the SMB protocol that Samba uses to communicate with Windows boxes.)

NetBIOS appeared to be disabled, so I turned it on, it didn't seem to change anything.

I've been playing, trying to figure it out, and I've noticed something interesting...if I'm plugged into the router everything works fine. In this case the wireless card and the ethernet card each get an IP address: 192.168.2.6 and 192.168.2.9. The win98 IP is 192.168.2.2. Samba works in this case. However, if I unplug the notebook from the router I lose internet connectivity entirely.

Now, if I boot up NOT connected to the router (ie trying to use the wireless to connect), my internet works fine and the wireless card gets an IP 192.168.1.47 (note the 1 in the second to last field of the IP, whereas above it's always a 2...does this matter?). But in this case samba still will not work.

So, th eproblem seems to be specific to the wireless interface. Any suggestions?

oh yeah, I forgot, if I try to ping the win98 box from the mdk (when using wirelss only) it just hangs. When I try to ping the mdk from the win98 I get "TTL expired in transit"

Hmm... sounds like a wireless problem.
Can you configure the wireless interface with a static IP address?
like:
192.168.2.47

I'm not sure what's involved with doing that...I used ifconfig to change the IP address, but then the network wouldn't work at all.

Could it have something to do with the driver I'm using? I had to buy a proprietary driver that wraps the windows drivers to get the wireless to work...

OK, weirdness...it started working randomly, but only for one session (with an IP of 192.168.2.6). Since then everytime I boot it has gone back to getting the 192.168.1.47 address. I've tried manually setting IP to 192.168.2.6 using ifcfg, but it causes complete loss of internet access. Anyone have ANY ideas about what I can try next, or know the correct way to force the device to have an IP of 192.168.2.6?