some networking issues

[keemo]

Hi all

Im trying to setup a network between a Mepis box and an XP machine. I can see the windows box from Mepis just fine, but when I try the other way around I get a prompt for a username and password and I've tried putting in the mepis username and password (root and normal) that didnt work. I also tried the Windows administrator username and password and that didnt work either. Any suggestions on how to avoid that?

another thing, I would like to have the windows shares to be mounted automatically and have shortcuts on the desktop on boot...any ideas how?

Thanks in advance.

[xeq3x]

on the linux box, you should first make a user identical to the user on the windows xp box: useradd [username]. then make a password for that user: passwd [username]. The next step is to make samba (the network service connecting windows machines to linux machines) aware of that user: smbpassword -a [username]. smbpassword should be identical to the password the user has on the windows xp box.
I put this in /etc/samba/smb.conf:

[homes]
comment = Home Directories
browseable = no
writable = yes
hide dot files = yes
create mask = 0770
directory mask = 0775

this makes you dynamically share the home directory of the user trying to access the pc. Inside the directory I put symbolic links to other parts of the filesystem the user should have access to.

to automatically mount shares from windows in linux, open /etc/fstab and add:
//[machine of ip address]/[share] /[path to mount on linux] smbfs noatime 0 0
example from my pc:
//10.0.0.99/shaihulud /mnt/mainframe smbfs noatime 0 0

if a user other than root must write to the filesystem, add gid=[user-gid],uid=[user,uid] after noatime seperated by commas.
To find out what your users uid and gid are, run the command id in a terminal. Normal values may be uid=1000(username) gid=100(group id)

[keemo]

cheers mate...that worked a treat!

[keemo]

One more question...
How do I go about sharing a printer?
The printer is plugged into the Linux box and is working fine, but im not quite sure how to share it...I searched a few forums but i got more confused. Maybe because I'm coming from a Windows background..

any help is greatly appreciated