NFS Windows/Linux

[John Chambers]

| 
| I have to second the recommendation to investigate SAMBA. It works
| and it's free. My Windows95 machine has access to all of the disks
| and the printer on my Linux box. It does this well, on it's own terms,
| and all of the stuff to make the Win95 end work came in the Win95 box.

Lucky you.  I've had samba installed here for  some  months,  and  the
tests  within  the  linux box all seem to say that everything is fine,
and smbd is sitting there eagerly awaiting requests.   But  none  ever
come  in.  The reason seems to be that the W95 box that we want to use
it with simply insists that its "network neighborhood" is empty.

There seems to be nothing we can find in W95's menus or  windows  that
will let us explain to it about the linux machine. The manuals we have
don't seem to mention the subject.  The idea seems to be that you just
turn  it on, it will explore the network, and all will be fine.  Nope;
it insists that there are no other computers on the network.

Actually, there are two other computers on the ethernet, a S5R4 and  a
linux  machine,  and  they talk to each other just fine.  Also, when I
bring up Microsoft's Internet Explorer on the W95 box and type in  the
IP  address  of  the  linux  box, it connects to the web server on the
linux system with no problems at all, thus proving that  the  ethernet
hardware  and the tcp/ip stuff are all ok.  But symbolic names totally
fail, because there's "no name server" (though the S5R4 box can  query
the linux's named without problems, and can also route through it when
hooked up to an ISP).

So samba may work for you, or you may  spend  a  lot  of  hours  being
baffled  by  why  the  W95  end totally fails.  You probably won't get
useful answers from the linux folks, because the linux end is in  fact
working. And you won't get useful answers from the Microsoft folks, of
course, once they hear the word "linux".  (You should  have  installed
NT, you know.  ;-)