Scenario:
Setup 1.

I have SAMBA running on a server.
This server is 100 percent linux.
All other computers accessing this server are windows machines.
I can go into Windows Networking and MAP a letter to the server.

With the above, I now can have a drive letter mapped to the server.
Everything works perfectly.

Setup 2.

I have SAMBA server running on a server.
This server is 100 percent Linux.
*Some* computers are LINUX computers running VMPlayer. VMPlayer is running Windows.

My problem lies in trying to map the Linux server inside the VMPlayer running Windows. I try to do a right click on networks and find the linux server, it doesnt exist. I tried mounting the server first, then loading up VMPlayer with windows. I still could not map or find the linux server.

I tried changing the wireless connection setup to attempt to go directly to the server, but to no avail.

How can I find (or map)on Windows XP running on VMPlayer the Linux Samba disk?

I have (I think) a similar setup. I have Samba running on my Ubuntu 10.04 machine with Windows XP running as a VMWare virtual machine on the same physical machine. The key is for the Windows machine to be able to find the address of the Linux machine. This can be facilitated with a DNS or LDAP server etc. As I have only a simple network I have use the brute force approach.

The Linux physical machine has a fixed IP address reserved in my router. I edited the hosts file on the Windows virtual machine (located logically(?) under c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc) to contain the entry taylor12 being the Linux physical machine.

A couple of suggestions...

From the Windows machine try to ping the Linux machine by name and IP address.
Try mapping the Samba share manually e.g. And a couple more things to check...

Are the Windows machine and the Samba server in the same workgroup? I think this is necessary to be able to browse the network in search of shares although I generally know the location and name of the share I wish to connect to and it has been a long time since I did any Windows network administration.

There was a setting in Win NT (and perhaps XP) re. which machine was the master browser. Again a distant memory. Not sure how that impacts more modern Windows versions.

I am using a "bridged" network adapter on the VM settings. This way the VM gets an address from the router in the same subnet as the physical Linux machine on which it is running. I can look at the router and see the address of the VM and ping it from another machine (physical or virtual) on my network.

Ken

I echo Ken's suggestions.

I have a WinXP VM (running in VirtualBox but I don't think the networking issues are all that different). It's connected via NAT but it can ping the samba server (a separate physical machine on my home network) by hostname and by IP address. (Without a custom hosts file.) It, and all the machines, are on the same workgroup - I think this is important.

Windows Explorer > My Network Places > Entire Network > Microsoft Windows Network shows a list of workgroups (for me, one). Expanding this shows the servers and the other PCs. Expanding the server shows the shares, and I can map to a drive letter.

Be sure to allow at least 2 minutes - maybe longer - for network resources to appear in windows, especially ... but not only ... if an hourglass cursor shows.