Q I have three machines connected on my network, and problems working between them. They are: LinBox running Mandrake 10.0, WinBox running Windows 2000, WebBox running Mandrake 9.1 as an internal web server.
The network seems to be working only partially. The connection seems fine between the Linux and Windows boxes - I can ping between them and WebBox can ping to both - but I can't ping to WebBox from either of them. However, I can open the default web page on WebBox (running Apache) at http://192.168.0.3:80, and using LinNeighborhood I can see the Linux and Windows boxes on all three machines, but not the web box (they are all in the same workgroup INTEGRANE). Can you suggest anything?
A It sounds to me like your web server box is not participating in the Windows network properly, even though its IP configuration is sound. It may be that there is a firewall running on the system, and it's blocking the SMB traffic from the network. To verify whether a firewall is running, run iptables -nvL. If you can ping the system by IP address, in this case 192.168.0.3, I think it is unlikely to be a routing issue. The fact that you can access the web server directly pretty much discounts any IP problems. What I'd suggest is that you compare the smb.conf files from LinBox and WebBox to establish if there is any configuration variation within Samba on the two systems, and to ensure that Samba is running correctly on your server.