Thursday, November 09, 2006

Networking 1 Accessing MS Windows Shares

I figured, what the heck let's just try the "click and pray" with accessing my MS Windows Network at home. My network has three desktop computers (one XP Pro, two Win 2000), One laptop (XP Pro), there's also a Xbox and a Tivo. I'm running this network in the peer to peer mode and we will call the workgroup KNIGHTMARE. Now each machine on this network has a single share we'll refer to them as MACHINE01\SHARE01, MACHINE02\SHARE02, MACHINE03\SHARE03. The laptop does not share anything.

Ok, now I clicked on PLACES then NETWORK SERVERS, that pops up a window that had an Icon in it that said WINDOWS NETWORK. I double click that Icon and another window appears listing all the workgroups/domains that Linux found. Guess what? There is an Icon labeled KNIGHTMARE. Cool. I double click on the KNIGHTMARE Icon and I see my computers, MACHINE01, MACHINE02, and MACHINE 03. I then double click on MACHINE01 and I see a list of its share, SHARE01. I tested this on all three machines and it worked. I go back to MACHINE01 and double click it. I then double click on SHARE01 and I get a pop up window asking for my USER NAME, DOMAIN/WORKGROUP, and PASSWORD.

Since I'm running a peer to peer network, I figure that this wants my USER NAME and PASSWORD for SHARE01 on MACHINE01. I know that when I set this share up on MACHINE01 I only gave the ADMINISTRATOR account access to it. So I use ADMINISTRATOR for the USER NAME and the administrator password for MACHINE01 for the PASSWORD. All of this was exactly right. Now the third box was asking for DOMAIN/WORKGROUP, well I figured that this would be KNIGHTMARE (my workgroup name) WRONG. I know from my MS Windows work that if the workgroup or domain doen't work here try the Machine name. So I put in MACHINE01 for this block. WRONG. Ok I decided one more try before I start reading. I left this block filled in with its default, WORKGROUP. Magic! it worked. But why?

I have not read why yet but I figure if the machine I want to access was part of a DOMAIN it would have said DOMAIN instead of WORKGROUP? Or is this just a Linux thing? If you know, feel free to post. Later I will be setting up a share on this Linux Box and ... uh...hmm... if I'm not supposed to use MS Windows at home how do I check my MS Windows to this Linux Box access... (I just heard evil laughter coming from my MS WINDOWS Laptop).


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just wondering why you chose Ubuntu. I have both Ubuntu and Knoppix, and Knoppix is far more Windows like than Ubuntu. It also boots in seconds as opposed to minutes in Ubuntu. Knoppix sees my hard drives and shows them on the desktop. Double clicking brings up a Windows Explorer like window. Less than 5 minutes after booting Knoppix, I was playing my music in the very Winamp like XMMS player. I haven't figured out how to do ANYTHING in Ubuntu yet

knightmare said...

A friend recommended Ubuntu to me and Ubuntu had just released version 6.1. I figured that I would need some help along the way so I took my friend's advise and installed what he was using.

I have a couple versions of Knoppix boot and run CD's but it was just too easy to eject the CD and reboot to MS Windows when I couldn't figure something out. I didn't really give Knoppix a fair try.

My friend told me to install AUTOMATIX (see my sidebar links) It's a package installer and it had two Codec Pack installers that fixed most of my media troubles

So far with Ubuntu I've just been pressing buttons until something happens, good or bad, then documenting the results here. :-)


Thanks for posting by the way, it's nice to know someone else is reading this.