[Samba] Trouble Connecting to Server

[Adam Nielsen]

> I'm having trouble connecting to my Samba server.  The immediate 
> symptom is that I cannot see my Samba server in my Windows Network 
> Neighborhood, and so I cannot connect to it to check my share
> connections.

You can still go Start | Run \\ip.address to connect to a 'hidden'
Samba server.

> Being cheap (perhaps pound foolish), I've not registered the test.biz 
> domain; although if it comes to that, I will.

That shouldn't matter, I've been using a nonexistent domain name for a
few years now.  I do have bind running so that doing "host
sserver.test.biz" would work, but I think entries in the hosts file
should be enough (if ping works, so should Samba.)

> I can ping all by hostname, as well as by FQDN; although it appeared 
> that I could not ping sserver by hostname only until I added sserver 
> and its FQDN to the PC's host file (which it reads as though it were 
> an lmhosts file).  I say "it appeared" because it looked like the 
> forward and reverse look up files for sserver appeared in the PC's 
> resolver cache before I made this addition, but I got too fast with a 
> ping test and contaminated that datum.

It sounds like "nmbd" isn't running, or more likely, it's only running
on one subnet.  There are all sorts of issues using NetBIOS names
across different subnets, but Google will tell you all about that.

If running \\samba.ip on a Windows box works, then this is definitely
the problem.

Cheers,
Adam.