I used to be able to access some shared folders on another machine on my home network. It's an xp machine and I could access it quite easily for example via smb://mshome/xphompc05/shared.

But all of a sudden it's stopped working and all I get is a timeout. Not even sure how to go about sorting this so any suggestions welcome.

Shared folders on networked xp machine via samba.

Access by smb://mshome/xphompc05/folders for example

Printing to a printer connected directly to the xp machine still works smb://mshome/xphompc05/psc750

Only things that have changed in the time period is changing the router to use the opendns servers instead of my isps, although this shouldn't affect anything on the internal side.

Also had an xp update downloaded and installed recently.

smb:/ in konqueror gives me mshome but trying to click down to xphompc05 results in a timeout.

Ta.

Try entering the ip address instead of xphompc05 and see if it works any better? Chances are if this works, then it's just a problem with the broadcast of the Netbios name which is the problem.

Yup, that worked!

Any idea what to do next to get it sorted?

Ta.

There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the NETBIOS service needs to have a bit of time to ensure the machine is browsable by machine name. This can take up to one hour from the time the machine was started or networking restarted. With Windows, if you found that another Windows machine wasn't accessible by name, but by IP address, you could use the:



command and it would find the machine name. After that initial command, if you then did a ping by the machine name, it would work, and you'd also be able to connect using the machine name. In Linux, I've not found an equivalent as of yet, or even searched to be honest to see if there is such a command to help. Usually though, it is best to ensure that both the Windows and Linux machines were configured in the same workgroup, as this will help to ensure that the machines will be able to connect by name. If they had different workgroup names, then this could also be why you can only connect using the IP address.

It looks like mshome is the workgroup that you're using.

Thanks Ian. With your suggestion I'm at least able to access the folders so I'll live with that. Maybe when I upgrade Mandriva it'll pick the names up again.

Ta.

An easy way to get the machine recognised by name, is simply add the machine name and IP address to your /etc/hosts file on the linux machine. Put this in /etc/hosts, for example:



and then you can use smb://mywindowsmachine/myshare to access it

Of course, replace my example above with the correct IP address and correct machine name for the Windows machine.

My router is assigning address by dhcp. Wouldn't that cause problems with the above solution?

Also wondering if /etc/hosts contains the info before it went pear shaped?

Cheers. I'll look tonight when I get home.

If DHCP, then no it wouldn't be possible unless each machine got the same IP address each time. It wouldn't have been in /etc/hosts before. This is just a way to get around it when the NETBIOS isn't being recognised correctly.