I have just installed Slackware 11 clean on what is to be my home server. After fighting with some conf files I got my server wireless card to connect to my wireless router. I can ping the router, can do internet browsing and see the samba shares on another workstation PC (currently running Suse 10.1) connected (hard-wired) to the router. The server gets an IP address assigned through DHCP.

However I cannot seem to see the server from the workstation. ie I cannot ping the server from the workstation PC nor can I see the samba shares I have set up on the server. Not much use as a server in fact. Is there something obvious I should do to enable this server to respond to the outside world? Firewall problem ?

Thanks for any help

Bogus

Firewall can block both ping and access to samba shares, so yes, check for and turn off any firewall while you troubleshoot. Might help if you post results of 'iptables -L'.

Here is the output from iptables you suggested I should post:

Output from iptables -L

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

I have started to look into what this means but am stuck on two issues:
(a) I don't really understand this output - does the "Policy ACCEPT" mean that I should be accepting all packets
(b) I am a bit surprised to find no /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall on my system which "Slackware Essentials" tells me is the place where iptables is configured.

Further help appreciated.

All we did was look at the list of 'iptables' rules; which, none seem to be implemented at this time. This tells me 'iptables' is not responsible for your problem.
For more info about 'iptables' look here or do 'man iptables'

On the server, can you 'ping localhost'?
On the server, can you 'ping <ipaddress>'?
On the workstation, are you trying to ping the server hostname or IP address?

I _can_ ping localhost from the server
I can also ping various ip addresses from the server including my router, the workstation and web servers including linuxquestions.org. Now that I know I can use host addresses wtih ping rather than jsut ip addresses, there is no limit to what i can ping from this machine.
I still seem unable to ping the server from the workstation, though - whether I use the hostname or the IP address which I get from 'ifconfig' on the server.

I think that all this may be caused by firewall settings on the router rather than on the two PCs. I can log into the router as Admin and set various security settings there. I think that it is keeping the wireless LAN separate from the hard-wired LAN. The server is connected to the router vis wireless while the workstation is hardwired. I will have a good read og the router manual, but I think that might be the "route" of the problem.