[CentOS] Slightly OT? - How do I set up Win98 to access a printer on my CentOS box?

Mon May 5 06:02:31 UTC 2008
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

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.