On Monday 05 January 2004 08:19 am, Anne Wilson wrote: > Right - well the first thing is to see what your windows boxes are > using. Check *all* the network config tabs and write down the > results. It's very likely that they are using dhcp - i.e. letting > the isp set your ip. That's fine on many counts, though there are > some advantages in using static I, my preferred option.
Actually, he originally posted: I ran ipconfig on the windoze box and it said: autoconfiguration IP address: 169.254.5.217 This seems to indicate that he is NOT using DHCP or anything else, but Windows is trying to do that zeroconf stuff and is auto assigning an IP address to the network card. That means that he may have an IP but it is pretty worthless for any type of interface unless he manually adds the address to hosts on all machines and even then, we should assume that it may change at each boot point. Windows gets around this by broadcasting (with NetBUI IIRC or RPC) on the local net, something that he would need Samba configured to do and a bad idea anyway since that broadcast could "leak" to the Internet and make your machine visible to sundry and all. If zeroconf was working on Mandrake and he had Samba installed and configured, he would theoretically be able to see the windows machine and connect to it using Samba. Static IP would allow all of the normal Linux connectivity to work as well, like FTP, SSH, VNC, etc. Your suggestion to switch to a static IP address is a VERY good one. He would be well advised to follow it. -- Bryan Phinney Software Test Engineer
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