[Samba] Network Path could not be found on HP with XP

[Daniel Feenberg]

We have one brand new HP EPC-43 which can see all the Windows boxes, but
not the Samba shares on the Unix server. We have many other Windows
machines of all vintages including 95, 98, 98se, NT, 2000, ME and XP which
can see each other and the Samba server. The HP runs XP, but we have other
XP boxes which have no difficulty with Samba.

We have a simple network with no domain controller, just individual
independent boxes. All see each other and the FreeBSD based SAMABA 2.3.3
server without difficulty.

For a long time we were convinced it must have something to do with
plaintext/encrypted passwords, but we have tried it both ways and still
get the message "The network path \\netdisk\sharename could not be found".
There is a pause of 30 seconds or so before the message appears,
suggesting to me that it is the host and not the share that can't be
found. 

The HP box has no trouble with any other network service that we can find
including other tcp/ip services. We did notice one odd thing about this
machine. As delivered from the factory, Netbui is not installed, and no
other hosts were recognized untill we installed it. The other XP machines
came with Netbui already loaded. That got us to thinking that maybe there
was something special about HPs installation of XP.

This is a hard problem to research on the mailing list, as two letter
search terms don't seem to be accepted at marc.theaimsgroup.com. Is there
another search engine for the samba mailing list that would accept "hp xp"
as a valid search?

Daniel Feenberg
feenberg at nber.org