I've spent the past several hours today (and yesterday) going over various articles, threads, writeups...books..you name it.

I'm very new to Linux (of any flavor)..and so far I've been able to install it properly, get my sound up, internet up and pretty much all the basics to have a running machine.

Now I'm trying to get into networking my Slackware 10.1 'box' (actually on a laptop) to my Windows XP Pro box. I went through the Samba writeups on this board, editing the smbf.conf (i think it was called), host file, entering in several other commands. I'm good at following specific commands, as I'm sure anyone is...but I have NO idea what any of this is doing. Even once I've added all this command lines and whatnot, I have no idea where to go from there. How I would even go about connecting my XP box. Telnet, run (\\<ipaddress>), etc.

As of now, I'm not even able to ping my Slackware laptop.

Needless to say, I'm completely lost. My impression of Linux, coming from a heavy Windows/DOS background, is that Linux seems to be needlessly complicated. It seems to set up any service, I have to have all this extra knowledge in vague and obscure commands, on top of knowing exactly what folder to create/modify a particular file, with very particular information, etc. Whereas with windows, it's all GUI. I don't MIND working with the command line. I began with DOS..and it took me until Windows 98 to switch over. I prefered DOS anyday. I even scripted my own boot menu, making it easier to navigate around with a somewhat GUI-like interface for people who weren't used to DOS.

Anyway..I'm just looking for some input here. I don't expect to be a master by anymeans in two days of toying with Linux, but I figured the learning curve would be a bit less steep considering my background. I'm struggling to find any basis of reference/foundation to Windows networking. I know it's more like apples and oranges here as far as comparing, but...yeah.

If any of this makes sense, I'm all 'ears'.

First things first -

1) You're learning a new language, and are asking why you're not conversant after 48 hours. Having a DOS background will help you much with the CLI in linux, but vary few of the DOS commands work in linux, and vice versa. You need to learn where things are, how to navigate, and what things do. Don't get stressed about it. When I first came from M$ I felt the same way, "gee I'd just do this in M$ and all would work". You can't expect to have the same ease of use. I thought I knew alot about computers and networking when all I did was M$ stuff, and now that I learned/am learning linux, it made my M$ skills stronger, because I understand the ideas behind the GUI in M$.

2) If you can't ping your slack box from the rest of the network, something is not configured correctly. You "may" have a firewall in place that is blocking pings, but that would be something you put in place yourself, I don't believe iptables, the default linux firewall, comes with pings blocked by default. Can the slack box ping the windows box? If it can, then it would seem to be firewall related.

smb.conf is not really necessary unless you want to be able to let the windows box "see" files on your slackware box. If you just want to be able to see shared directories off of your XP box, then you shoud try smbmount allows you to send the username/password to the windows box to see its shares. You don't need smb.conf at all to do this. Samba is a great, great tool, but also a major headache for a linux beginner. It is often a major headache for experienced users as well. Read up the smbmount pages, and try using that command to see your XP box. Through that, you can copy files off the windows box onto your slack box, and if you have files that you want to put onto windows from slack, you can just copy them from the slack box into the shared directory. You won't be able to browse the slack box from windows, for that you would need to play with smb.conf.

Also, you provided descriptions of your problems, but almost nothing like your actual smb.conf or IP info, which would help us to give you a more specific answer. Its kind of like asking for car mechanical help over the phone, and saying" my breaks don't work". The more detail the better.

Good luck in your learning!

Peace,
JimBass

yeah so,
Samba is a bit knarly to get the hang of mostly if only because it's capable of doing lots of different things beyond just simple filesharing. Which i assume is what your trying to do. This should not be refered to as "networking".
There are many frontends(GUI's) availbale for all manner of things in linux.
and if it is your preference to use them then you might try a different distro till you come to the conclusion that things work much better without them. RedHat and Mandrake are heavy into GUI stuff and will prolly be more comfortable for you at the moment. The whole concept in Slack is to do things yourself with config files. So if you don't like that you wont like slack. Although i should mention that it is an excellent distro.
as far as your current troubles go. We(the linux freaks that would like to help you get into using the best OS on the planet) need to know a bit more about your situation.
Are your XP box and your Slack-Top on the same network?
is your Slack-Top on a network at all?
can you ping the xp box from slack and browse the web?
is 'smbd' running on the slack box?
as root run the following to see if it is:
'pidof smbd' will output the process # of smbd if it is running.
there are actually several programs that need to be running for samba to work and i can't recall the others. But thats a start.

this should help.
www.samba.netfirms.com/shares.htm

in future posts you should put samba in the title
not networking they are seperate things and you are more likely to get a samba nut to help you.

good luck

Quick question; on your Slackware box, what is the result when you run "ifconfig" as root (use the command "su -" to become the root user)? You need to make sure first that your laptop is even on the network.

Try running (again, as root), "dhcpcd" -- this is the DHCP client daemon which will let you connect to your network. You may want to run "netconfig" to set up specific settings.

Thanks for the replies. I'll try to be a bit more specific.

My slack box is on the network. I'm able to get on the internet and ping my XP box, but when trying to ping my slack box with XP, it gives me a timeout.

As far as Samba not being 'networking'...as far as I can tell, it enables me to network. IE. File share between computers, and in my case, Slack to XP. So part of my issues were with trying to figure out Slack, but also Linux in general. And I'm gathering it's just Slackware. =)

I actually prefer being more hands on and in control. I guess at this point it's too difficult for me to understand the whole picture. I'm only seeing smaller pieces, all of which make little to no sense because I have no background in it. Each writeup I look into, concerning different services or things to seutp/use, seem to have their own separate commands and particulars. Either I'm not experienced enough to see the correlation, or I'm right and each separate portion is, essentially, a world unto itself that I'll have to master.


1. Are your XP box and your Slack-Top on the same network? Yes
2. is your Slack-Top on a network at all? Yes
3. can you ping the xp box from slack and browse the web? Yes
4. is 'smbd' running on the slack box? Yes, at bootup. I confirmed this by using pkgtool, setup, etc. It's selected
5. as root run the following to see if it is: 'pidof smbd' will output the process # of smbd if it is running. there are actually several programs that need to be running for samba to work and i can't recall the others. But thats a start. 3294 & 3292 are running


Perhaps the real question I should be asking it where to begin? Is there a particular exercise, series of exercises, book(s), tasks...whatever I should be looking into? I've taken it pretty slow so far, working out each issue as it's come up. But now I'm getting into the more advanced features/tasks of Linux.

My ultimate goal here is to become a Linux Administrator, as I am a Windows Administrator. So I realize I'll be learning a LOT of commands vs. pointing and clicking. I also realize this will take time and work. But despite searching, and reading a bunch..I'm really at a loss as to where to continue. I picked Samba for its file sharing abilities...figuring this would be a good first step to get my Linux and XP box to network on some level. I don't want to give up on Slackware, or try using another flavor. I like that fact that Slackware is 'closest to UNIX'. It might be harder for me right off, but with this boards help, I'm confident I'll find my path and work my way through it.

Update: After going through a tutorial and messing around with stuff, I was actually able to see my Slackware box in my network places (on my XP box). After creating an account and using the smbpasswd -a <account> command, I can now log into my Slackware box from my XP box. Yaaay.

Now I need to figure out how to go about getting my Slackware box to connect to my XP box. Not sure how to do that, considering it's not GUI.

Thanks for all the replies again...I took a break for most of the day, came back refreshed and in about 10min had it working. Just gotta keep reading. Oy!

Next update: Figured out how to mount my Windows share on my Slackware box. At first, I was getting tripped up by the two parts of the command:

smbmount //<ip address>/<share name> /mnt/<share folder under> -o guest

Because it's NOT GUI, you have to first go to the /mnt directory, create the name of your share (locally), then in the first portion specify the IP addy of the Windows box, and then the name of the share on the Windows box. The end is pretty self explanatory, I think.

After entering the command, it is 'mounted' and thus displayed in the share folder you created. Makes perfect sense now!

Hey fell, congrats on your progress so far - you are doing great. I struggled with the same issues you have for a lot longer before getting my solutions.

One neat thing I found is a program called puTTY, it has a Win application and allows you to ssh straight into the Slack box (as a regular user) and then su to root to copy files around HTH

mark

Yeah, I actually used to use puTTY back in the day when I was half serious about learning Linux. Didn't last long, but I remember how compact and powerful that little tool was. Thanks for reminding me!

you can also try this prog http://www.bnro.de/~schmidjo/

Interesting...thanks for the link. Checking it out now.