Mark Hull-Richter wrote:
I can ping the CentOS host by IP address and, now that there's a hosts file, by host name as well. However, Win98 can't see the network at all
- claims there isn't one. It is running the M$ client for M$ networks
(and for NetBIOS networks, as well), but the network is not getting properly initialized. And now we are definitely sliding OT here (is there a forum where and answer to this can be found?).
Win98 uses a much older version of Microsoft Networking. it works strictly on the old NBT ports 135/137/138/139 and not the newer native SMB port 445 stuff that XP etc use. You need to make sure Samba is configured to support this retroactive stuff. I believe it also has to support an older "LM Hash" or something for passwords (LM means LAN Manager, which is what SMB networking grew out of). And, you probably will want to setup WINS, where the SAMBA server can be a WINS server, and ALL SMB clients should be configured to reference this WINS server by its IP, that takes care of SMB host resolutions much better than messing with lmhosts files.
btw, hosts.sam is just a 'sample' file. windows uses HOSTS for tcp name resolution (much like unix), and uses lmhosts for LM Netbios resolutions. format is similar, and there's some fuzzy crossover between these which makes troubleshooting fun.