I'm having trouble connecting my windows machines to my linux machine. I can get to evryone from linux and I can see my linux machine in my workgroup on windows but when I click on it, it says \\localhost is not accessible. A duplicate name exists on the network. Can anyone help?

What are your computer names? It's possible that you do have 2 identically named pcs on your network.

No I don't have two pcs named the same. Right now I have two laptops running windows 2000 and a desktop running red hat 9. Could it be that having two users with the same user name would cause this?

I have seen something like this at work in a totally W2K environment. 2 pcs with different names (as far as I knew) seemed to share names. In the registry (and this will take a while) do a search for machine_name or the name of the pc as you think it should be. You may well find that the pcs share a name.

Ok it seems to have cleared up. I restarted all the windows machines and now everything works. Maybe because I restarted the linux box a couple times windows thought there were two localhost computers.. I don't know.. Thanks for your help!

NP - glad to help - even though you fixed it yourself!

I'm getting this problem too and i only have one windows xp computer trying to connect to one linux machine. I can see the linux machine but i get that error when i try to connect to it. I tried changing the name of the windows computer but i still get the error. i used to have a windows 98 computer hooked up to the network and it worked fine with my linux machine. Anyone know what I can do?

I just set up Samba on my RH 9 box following directions from the RH documentation and a book called Red Hat Linux Professional Secrets. When I try to access the Samba shares from my Win2K machine, I get an error message that the network path cannot be found. Using smbclient -L FIATLUX on the linux box seems to show everything is fine. Then, I read in the book that, "... it's difficult to access the Samba server from Windows 2000... Windows 2000 expects a Windows 2000 network... In a Windows XP Professional system you can edit a key in the registry to enable the XP system to access the Samba server..." The book says nothing about how to work around the problem with Win2k. First question: Can, in fact, a Win2K machine access a Samba server? If so, how?
Thanks.
Randy

Yes it can, I have 2 windows 2000 computers and a redhat 9.0 set up as a server. I can access the samba fine.
I am wondering how you are trying to access it? from the run prompt with \\IP Number or through My Network? or are you trying to go to the computer name? You might not have DNS set up right. Or if you read the man page there is a main config file, I think /etc/samba/smb.conf that has a list of accepted host. You might just add the entire subdomain, if you are on a failrly secure network. Behind a firewall or something.
Let me know if that helps, or some more info.

Todd

Part of the problem is that there are so many factors, I dont' know where to look. I can ping the IP number of the Samba box from the Win2K box. My Net Gear wireless access point/router sees the Samba box and recoginzes its host name (FiatLux) -- BUT the Net Gear router does not see the Win2K box -- not even that the IP is active even though the Win2K box is talking to the world through that access point using the wireless connection. On the other hand, neither the other Win2K machine, nor the Win XP machine see the Samba server either -- even though everybody can ping it. In short, a major part of the problem is that I don't know what I'm doing just with the straight networking, never mind the Samba part.
Sorry, forgot to mention that I've tried connecting by searching for the computer name, clicking the "Entire Network" icon, and entering \\FiatLux\ in the address bar of the file browser, all to no avail.
Any pointers would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Randy

One more thing. I've mounted both the Win2K drives on the Linux box and I can read write and otherwise manipulate the files there. So, it's the Win2K to Linux pathway that's not working.

look in your /etc/samba/smb.comf file, there si a line that says host allow, try adding your entire subnet to see if that works. if your ip is 192.168.1.100 then ad 192.168.1. this will let wnyone from this subnet access the smb server.

Also you might check your firewall settings this has caused me trouble in the past.

And try putting in the IP rather that the name, the name at the run prompt is useing netbios wich might be part of your trouble.

let me know if that helps
Todd

connect through lan ip address's